Out of Many, English:  The Three-Generation Model of Language Shift in Three Generations of Immigrants to  the United States

The Three-Generation Model (hereafter also the TGM) is the prevailing theory of language assimilation. According to the model it takes three generations for an immigrant family to lose the mother tongue and shift to English. Since the model forms the basis for theory and research, it is important to ascertain the validity of the model. This thesis therefore examined to what extent the Three-Generation Model of language shift can be applied to contemporary immigrant groups in the United States. In order to answer this question, this descriptive research built on U.S. census data from 1980, 2000, and 2018 to reflect the three generations. This data was collected by IPUMS (Integrated Public Use Microdata Series). The proportions of monolinguals with a non-English mother tongue, multilinguals, and monolinguals who speak English were determined, in order to describe the linguistic assimilation process. Findings appear to be in agreement with the TGM. While roughly two-thirds of the first...Show moreThe Three-Generation Model (hereafter also the TGM) is the prevailing theory of language assimilation. According to the model it takes three generations for an immigrant family to lose the mother tongue and shift to English. Since the model forms the basis for theory and research, it is important to ascertain the validity of the model. This thesis therefore examined to what extent the Three-Generation Model of language shift can be applied to contemporary immigrant groups in the United States. In order to answer this question, this descriptive research built on U.S. census data from 1980, 2000, and 2018 to reflect the three generations. This data was collected by IPUMS (Integrated Public Use Microdata Series). The proportions of monolinguals with a non-English mother tongue, multilinguals, and monolinguals who speak English were determined, in order to describe the linguistic assimilation process. Findings appear to be in agreement with the TGM. While roughly two-thirds of the first generation of immigrants spoke a non-English mother tongue (whether alongside English or not), 95.9% of the third generation reported that they spoke only English, which suggests that they lost the mother tongue. Nearly a third of the first generation was already a monolingual speaker of English in the first generation. The difference between the second and the third generation was especially large. Further research could aim to strengthen these findings, or to find out the reasons behind these results.Show less

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Out of Many, English: The Three-Generation Model of Language Shift in Three Generations of Immigrants to the United States