This percentage of English population in the US is extrapolated from 1980 US population census upon which the English amounted 49 million of 188 million of US population, let’s say the English population still amounts one quarter of US population in 2022 (85 million of 330 million). Why do most Americans of non English descent speak English only in daily life (second language learnt at school is barely used in daily conversation)?
26 comments
…That’s the language taught in schools?
We were a British colony. It was the main language spoken by the colonists. As we grew, that remained the primary language.
A large percentage don’t speak English at home. It’s over 20%
Because we were founded by people who speak English and that led to it becoming the national lingua franca.
French and Indian war
Because our culture was heavily shaped by our origin as a British colony
Colonization and conquest. English people killed tons of native indigenous people and claimed their land. And when other cultures and people also were making colonies through conquest and war, these English colonize established strong business connections. And through more war, and business deals, these descendants from English culture dominated America and claimed the whole country. And part of colonization is making your culture the dominant default culture, and making those of the people you conquerer unwanted, unliked, hard to use, outlawed, etc.
So we taught English in schools, we made all legal things in English, we didn’t allow indigenous people to learn their language. We enslaved Africans from a wide variety of countries and mixed them up so they weren’t with people from a similar culture or language so they couldn’t group together and so they had to adopt our culture. So all of that put together is why English is the most popular language.
And then English speakers invented the internet, so coding and typing is done in English, using our letter and number system. So if you want to work in Tech you have to further learn how to use our language.
To piss off the british by removing the unnecessary “u”s from words. Seriously, colour? Honour? Don’t get me started on “centre”.
Born and raised in America, what do you expect we’d speak?
You’ve didn’t include the Scottish and Irish descendants in your calculations here, which speak English for the same reason we do.
Because I think I’d have to go back to my Great-Great grandparents to find a person who wasn’t born in the US.
World War I and the invention of radio kind of made a one-two punch. Prior to WWI there were entire communities where a language other than English was spoken. You could find German-only towns in parts of Texas and the Midwest, Spanish only in Arizona and New Mexico and French only in Louisiana and Maine.
During World War I, the German-American community in particular was pressured to assimilate and among other things, speak English as their first language. The radio also opened a lot of these communities up to general American culture and within a generation you see them switch from having English as a second language to having their “native” language as their secondary
It’s not the number of English immigrants, it’s that English were largely the *first* immigrants. In short order, English was pretty established as the *de facto* language here for European immigrants.
Why do they speak English in Scotland and Ireland? Why do they speak English in Australia? Why do they speak English in India? There’s more English speakers in India than there are in England.
Language isn’t genetic
We started out as a British colony and actively suppressed learning other languages in some areas earlier in our history.
Most immigrant groups tended to and still assimilate linguistically into the dominant English speaking culture of the country.
In the early 1900’s, German was one of the most common languages in the Midwest due to the sheer number of German immigrants. It’s still comprises a high percentage of ancestry in people today. Due to WWI and WWII paranoia, the German language was pretty much forced to stop being spoken and published, and the population was pretty much forced to be assimilated to speak English. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Americans
Most other immigrant groups were so small that it became impractical to only speak the language of the home country, and gradually English became dominant.
We started with mostly just people of British decent. When the Germans showed up, they spoke German but because the people who were already here and more numerous spoke English, they learned to speak English so they could be understood. The same process repeated again and again with each new group of immigrants that came in. Sometimes the process was more forceful than others, but over time the established English-speaking population grew larger and larger. Now, it doesn’t matter if we are no longer majority of British descent because no group has come in with large enough numbers of speakers of a different language to make replacing English make any sense.
In any case, if you look at US ethnic demographics, [English-speaking origins represent the largest group](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_United_States#2020_American_Community_Survey). It isn’t the majority, far from it. But it is a larger group than any one other language so it makes sense to have English be the common language to bind all of these groups together. For the sake of understanding my link, keep in mind that English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, and Scotch-Irish are all populations that came from majority English-speaking areas and that “American” on that list is primarily of English and Scottish decent, just long enough ago that they stopped bothering to track the specific origin. Even just English+Irish is more than all of the Spanish-speaking origins added up.
Did someone really just ask this question?
Assimilation.
I’m of mostly German decent, but my immigrant great-grandparents died like 70-80 years ago so we don’t speak German anymore. English is just the defacto language so we speak that. I did take 3 years of German in college, but I can’t do much more than order beer and ask where the bathroom and library are.
Ancestry is not a factor when it comes to learning English. Unlike the British Isles, which had multiple established languages before England took over, America colonized the continent while speaking English. It’s pretty clear that Scotland, Ireland and Wales have a very different history with English than America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Native and immigrant languages could not compete because speakers were too few in number, they weren’t institutionalized to the extent English was and eventually knowing the common language of the country became unavoidable. They either learned English or their kids did.
Our Scottish and Irish Immigrants also primarily spoke English. But that aside we spent 2 centuries give or take as British Colonies, thus needing to use English to interact with our government. Upon gaining independence we retained the fact that most of the populace spoke English and that was the lingua franca used as we expanded. New immigrants learned English to interact with the existing population.
Because 75% of this country did not come here all at once lol
English is an official language in many states if not at the federal level.
Technically, now it is possible to only know spainish and move up through American society