Although Chinese Americans set up Chinese heritage language schools as early as 1848 to preserve the heritage language and to promote a sense of ethnic identity among their American-born children (Chao, 1997), there is strong evidence that language shift to English is taking place rather rapidly within the Chinese communities across the U.S. Data from the 2006 ACS show that while only 34.1 percent of first generation (i.e. foreign-born) Chinese Americans reported speaking ‘English very well’, the percentages rise dramatically for those who are American-born (i.e. second generation and beyond) or born overseas but arrived in the U.S. before the age of 16 (i.e. the 1.5 generation). 70.4 percent of the 1.5 generation and 93.8 percent of the American-born Chinese Americans reported speaking ‘English very well’. Additionally, only about 27.6 percent of the ABCs were estimated to speak their heritage language at home. Taken together, these estimates suggest that the rate of shift from Chinese to English is accelerating. Jia (2008) finds that even for first generation Chinese Americans, their Chinese language skills continue to decline with increasing English immersion. Rapid language shift to English means that many ABCs speak English as one of their native languages, if not the only one. This raises interesting sociolinguistic questions concerning the characteristics of the English spoken by ABCs and how ABCs utilize varieties of English to construct and negotiate differences with respect to each other and vis-à-vis the larger social structure.

The concept of immigrant generation is complex. Americans use the ordinal designations first-, second-, third-, even ‘1.5’-generation to refer to individuals' varying relationship to their family's moment of immigration. But these terms are much more fluid in practice than the rigidity of the numbers implies, and the nature of that fluidity is changing over time. Furthermore, different waves of immigration mean different experiences of generation identity; a first-generation immigrant in the 1880s entered an American community that was drastically different than the one a first-generation immigrant enters today.

One example of these shifts in the meaning of immigrant generation is among Asian Americans across the country, particularly those in California. In this paper, we discuss the relationship between language and immigrant generation with respect to Chinese Americans in the San Francisco Bay Area of Northern California, the region of the United States with the longest history of Chinese immigration and settlement. We focus in particular on the pronunciation of English, drawing on data collected in the Bay Area from 2008–2009 to argue that Chinese cultural and linguistic practices are gaining currency in the wider community. Our discussion looks at the experiences of third and higher immigrant generations, especially as they interact with more recent waves of immigrants, and the resulting dominance of Chinese and other Asian identities across the Bay Area. The layered and rapidly shifting Chinese American experience suggests potential future directions for the study of other immigrant communities in the United States.

For many centuries, the United States has opened its doors to a variety of immigrants throughout the globe, engendering situations that Fishman (2004: 406) characterizes as ‘pluralistic societal impact.’ Upon coming to America, twentieth century immigrants found themselves immersed in a context in which not only their cultures clashed with that of the U.S., but also their mother tongues interacted with American English. The language patterns resulting from such interactions between immigrants' native languages and American English has been of great interest to the linguistic research community for the past several decades. For instance, research in the field of language contact has been particularly marked by the influential work undertaken by Thomason and Kaufman (1988) in which they developed a model to predict the nature of these contact-induced changes and to examine the mechanism by which these changes emerge.

Arab Americans comprise one of the fastest growing immigrant groups in the United States. Like many of the other groups discussed in the articles in this issue, we know almost nothing about the linguistic practices of Arab Americans. This paper discusses one aspect of language use among U.S.-born and immigrant Arab American youth living in Dearborn, Michigan. I show how the participants in this study use a vowel that is part of the Northern Cities Shift (NCS), a widespread regional sound change in the United States. This study and others like it have repeatedly shown that fine-grained differences in the pronunciation of vowels are a rich resource for the expression of social identities and distinctions (Eckert, 2000; Hay and Drager, 2007; Dodsworth, 2008). Until recently, most studies investigating regional sound changes had not considered the social patterning of these variables among minority speakers. This lack of attention may stem from longstanding views that use of these variables is limited to white speakers (Labov, 2001). This study shows that Arab Americans in Dearborn are making use of NCS variables to express social differences that are not related to mainstream white majority speakers but based on local social information and categories. In the remainder of this paper I describe the community and research site, then present and discuss the results of my statistical analysis.

Within American sociolinguistics there is a substantial body of research on race as a social variable that conditions language behavior, particularly with regard to black speakers of African American English (AAE) in contact with their white neighbors (e.g., Wolfram, 1971; Rickford, 1985; Myhill, 1986; Bailey, 2001; Cukor-Avila, 2001). Today, the communities that sociolinguists study are more multi-layered than ever, particularly in a metropolis like New York City, thus warranting more complex analyses of the interaction between race and language. Along these lines, Spears (1988) notes the sorely underestimated social and linguistic heterogeneity of the black population in the U.S., which needs to be considered in studies of the language of black speakers. This critique is addressed in work of Winer and Jack (1997), as well as Nero (2001), for example, on the use of Caribbean English in New York City. These two studies broaden our notions of the Englishes spoken in the United States by black people, particularly first generation immigrants. The current research goes one step further with an examination of the English spoken by children of black immigrants to New York City.

We focus on second generation Caribbean populations whose parents migrated from the English-speaking Caribbean to the United States, and who commonly refer to themselves as West Indians.

Demographic data indicate that the English of Mexican Americans is destined to play a key role in the sociolinguistic study of language variation in the United States. In fact, Mexican American speakers are reported to account for more than 12.5% of the U.S. population. In 2003, the U.S. Census released data showing that Latinos and Latinas had replaced African Americans as the largest minority ethnic group in the U.S., and by 2007, 29.2 million Americans listed their ancestry as Mexican (Pew Hispanic Center, 2009). Moreover, in addition to the large numbers of Mexicans (first generation) and Mexican Americans (second generation) living in the Southwest, we are now seeing a new representation of these ethnic groups in other areas, such as the South. For example, between 1990 and 2000, North Carolina experienced a higher percentage of growth in its Mexican American population than any other state (Wolfram, Carter & Moriello, 2004).

These statistics are important with respect to language because they reveal that a large and increasing population of English speakers in the U.S. are Latinos and Latinas of Mexican origin. Our notion of American English, then, must be extended to include the variety traditionally spoken by the children of Mexican immigrants in the U.S., generally referred to in the literature as Chicano English. In addition, if we look at the Mexican American population as a whole, we will find a number of other varieties of English spoken.

In this essay, I examine language use among Puerto Ricans in the U.S., and evaluate evidence that suggests that they are shifting to English more quickly than other Latino groups. This accelerated adoption of English might seem to be a positive trend to proponents of English-only or to those who fetishize assimilation as the route to success in the U.S.; however, the fact that it is very often accompanied by a loss of Spanish is troubling to those who value multiculturalism and bilingualism. The idea that Puerto Ricans are the group that takes the lead in the loss of bilingualism among Latinos is a source of debate for observers of the sociolinguistic reality of Latinos in the U.S.

With a particular focus on the Puerto Rican community in Chicago, I first discuss language loss among Latino populations in the U.S. Then, I offer a brief overview of Puerto Rican immigration history, and of Latino presence in Chicago. Lastly, I address the allegedly exceptionally rapid shift of Puerto Ricans to English, and discuss possible reasons for this phenomenon. I conclude that even though there are sites where this assertion seems to be true, we need more evidence that captures actual language use patterns across a range of contexts before we can arrive at a definitive characterization of Puerto Rican speech practices.

In a downtown Border City, Ontario coffee shop, I interviewed Carlo, an Italian-Canadian man in his late 50s. He explained that his children, who are in their 20s, do not demonstrate much productive use of Italian, but that they have maintained the language in that they understand their grandparents' Italian and can imitate their Italian-accented English. I refer to the linguistic phenomenon that Carlo mentions as Stylized Italian English (SIE), which is the primary focus of this paper.

This paper begins with a brief ethnographic and linguistic background of the community and participants. I then explore specific features of Stylized Italian English as it is used in multigenerational family interactions, showing that second and third generation family members use SIE to index Italianness. Finally, I discuss SIE within larger contexts of language shift and maintenance and language contact research.