I grew up in New Jersey and now live in California. Growing up, I feel like the like the majority of Latinos I’ve met wether at school or outside of school, all knew decent Spanish. Regardless of what generation they were, and even if their Spanish wasn’t perfect, they could easily hold conversations with other Spanish speakers. I’ve since moved to California and this has now changed. I encounter Latinos regularly who tell me they don’t speak Spanish. I had a Latino roommate who told me he can’t communicate at all in Spanish. How common is this where you live?
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I live in Little Dominica (northern Manhattan), but I still know a few who don’t speak Spanish.
Just a guess but 15-20% speak only English?
(Probably the same amount who speak only/mostly Spanish.. then the rest are bilingual)
It’s pretty common here. There’s lots of jokes about “No sabo kids,” but when even your grandma was born in the US, I’d say it’s not surprising that Spanish isn’t used anymore.
Edit: People don’t seem pressed when 3rd/4th gen European-Americans don’t speak German or whatever anymore, but when you’re a visible minority somehow it’s noteworthy.
I’m not speaking for everyone but in my experience, it’s generational. I’m White Hispanic (white father, Hispanic mother) and my Hispanic side has been here since around the 1920’s. This side of my family has primarily grown up in Los Angeles County. I don’t speak Spanish. Many of my older cousins do not either. I also have a few friends who are later generation Hispanic and do not speak the language or are not fluent.
A lot of either the newer generation Americans or younger later generations tend to either know it or are learning it.
TBH op I don’t know what part of California you moved to but that sounds pretty anecdotal. Almost everybody here, Latino or not, speaks at least some Spanish. We have the largest Spanish speaking population in the country, largest percentage of the population that is Spanish speaking, and largest percentage of Hispanic people.
I’m from Miami and we have a heavy Cuban-American (including myself) population, and I’d say 90% of us know Spanish. I’ve only met a handful of people in Miami that don’t know Spanish. A lot of Cuban immigrants here don’t know English actually. I can’t speak with certainty for any other group, but I have friends from other countries who also know Spanish, so.
I find that Latinos who have parents that can speak English are less likely to know any Spanish as they don’t need to learn the language to communicate with their family.
Extremely common in my city for younger people
Depends how recent their family immigrated. If their parents are immigrants they tend to know English and Spanish. If the immigrants are grandparents or further back, then typically they speak English and maybe a little bit of Spanish at best. There’s obviously exceptions to the norm
It’s pretty common. I work in the trades and when I started out I had a Latino guy that would make fun of me for being a Jew and would say how I didn’t fit in because I was working with all Mexicans, but he didn’t speak Spanish when I can and had only been to the resort or right across the border in Mexico. I learned the the more an American would try and hold it down for La Raza the more gringo he actually was.
I work with a few, they call them coconuts.
In Texas it’s fairly common for people to not know Spanish if their family has lived in the US for several generations. People are still going to assume you speak it though.
One of my hispanic friends is from a border town but barely speaks any Spanish at all. She often has problems when Hispanic men try to approach her in Spanish and she has to tell them she doesn’t speak it. A lot of the time they don’t believe her and assume she’s just stuck up and doesn’t want to talk to them.
It’s a very common phenomenon that a lot of language proficiency is lost by the third generation, all but lost by the fourth. First generation immigrants rely on their native language, but their children begin relying on English once they go to school. It becomes the only time that they practice Spanish is at home with their parents and only then it’s spoken Spanish- not academic, not written. Then that second generation grows up and has children who they speak English with and who only learn English. I have taught many third generation Hispanics who know little to no Spanish. When I explain this phenomenon to the class, those students will often go “yes, that is exactly what happened to me”. This is rarer in areas where there are large Spanish speaking populations, though.
I was in an ESL workshop one time and the present was talking about an encounter she had with an immigrant mother. The child had taken to English very well, and had scored high enough on his ESL assessment that he no longer required services. He could function very well in an English only environment. A few years go by, and she runs into the family and is talking with the mother (the presenter was bilingual) and the mother lamented that she could no longer hold conversations with her son, they were practically strangers, because of how large the language barrier had grown.
The presenter was sad that they (not literally them, of course) had taken a functionally bilingual child and turned him monolingual and unable to communicate work his own parents. What a loss.
I once went on a study abroad with a guy whose mother was Cuban-he began studying Spanish in college. His mother refused to teach it to him growing up because she didn’t want him being ridiculed as a child. She wasn’t particularly happy about him learning it as an adult either.
One article that talks about it
https://www.ksat.com/news/local/2021/10/16/many-third-generation-hispanics-dont-speak-spanish-but-their-parents-do-why/
Another that says that trend could be reversing
https://www.latimes.com/lifestyle/story/2023-01-31/how-language-affects-identity-for-latinos
Fairly common. I remember starting kindergarten (1989) and there was an ESL kids that were almost entirely Spanish speaking kids where most did not speak English. By the time we finished sixth grade, all of them other than 1-2 spoke English just fine and were 100% into English only education and not ESL for Middle School and High School. Their accents go across a fairly broad spectrum from barely noticeable to weak.
Since we are now pushing 40, many of them have kids, and I would be willing to bet that most of their kids do not speak Spanish, and if they do, its at a very rudimentary level and their parents are likely trying to get them to take Spanish classes at school. My uncle married a Mexican woman and they have a daughter who is 15. She doesn’t speak Spanish even though she has Mexican citizenship in addition to US. If I had to guess she would be more interested in learning Japanese.
Rare
I am from the Northern Virginia/ DC area and it is very uncommon for a latino person not to speak Spanish there. Nowadays I live in Manhattan and it is a bit more likely here. Mainly what I run into are Latinos who speak Portugués (so Brazilians). I have also run into people who speak native languages instead of Spanish. There is a pizzería filled with guys like that near me.
The Latino who doesn’t speak Spanish thing is really a west coast phenomenon I think, but it can easily happen anywhere. Just two or three generations to lose a language.
Miami – very common for people born in the US to English-speaking parents. For people to learn Spanish, generally, the parents must ONLY speak Spanish. Even then, I have friends where it’s still iffy.
From NYC, I think I can safely say I’ve met someone from every Hispanic country and most speak Spanish. I even know people whose parents don’t but they do because their grandparents taught them. Even 3rd and 4th generation Spanish speakers as well. I would say 9 out of 10 know Spanish.
Florida (Tampa specifically) is a huge mixed bag. There’s Latinos that speak Spanish, those that understand but don’t speak, those that are trying to learn/improve, and those that dont speak at all.
My Mexican grandparents and their US-born oldest child managed not to be deported during Mexican Repatriation in the 1930. After that, they only taught English to their kids in hopes of better assimilating them into US culture. I know more Spanish than my dad only because I studied it in high school.
I’m Puerto Rican/Cuban on my dad’s side and Italian on my mom’s. My dad grew up speaking Spanish but his parents pushed using English as much as possible, for right or wrong they felt it would be advantageous to do so. He married my mom, who only spoke English. So my brother and I were only exposed lightly to some Spanish phrases, we never spoke it except for taking it in HS. I’ve met Latinos who are shocked to learn I don’t speak fluent Spanish. But I’m ok with it.
if i had to give a guesstimate? the population here is 80% latino/hispanic and id say about 75% of them are not fluent in spanish. Thats not to say they cant get by with what they know but if im including only those who are fluent? about 75%.
It’s not unprecedented.
My cousin’s father is hispanic and he walked out when we were kids, so he grew up with his white mother. She didn’t speak Spanish, so he never learned. That said, I don’t know for a fact that his father spoke Spanish either
Not very common, in my experience. Most of them are bilingual, some speak only Spanish.
In Chicago I have worked with both. Most of my friends who were second generation immigrants can only speak a little. And they admit that they mix up forms all the time and will omit words not normally found in English.
My wife doesn’t know Spanish. They migrated here 3 generations ago to LA. And at the time her grandparents refused to allow her mom/family to speak Spanish. They adapted to their new land as many in the west did. Today it’s not so common with newer generations of immigrants to have this attitude.
I live in the Bronx, it’s all Dominicans. More people don’t speak English than don’t speak Spanish. It blew my mind when I went to target and some of the employees didn’t speak English.
I’m half chicana – mexican by blood but family has been in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas area for probably hundreds of years so not immigrants.
My Nana born in the 1920s spoke Spanish, but only taught half the kids. She was also too self-conscious to speak much around “real” speakers in stores and stuff.
So my mom (and of course me) don’t speak it
I’m a Latino, sitting on the couch with my Latino brother? So in my immediate area, it’s universal.
Pretty uncommon here in San Antonio. Probably because it was a Mexican state before it became its own country.
When I lived in Colorado, it was much more common for children of Spanish speaking parents to not know Spanish.
So, it’s weird to see the regional difference.
It’s fairly common here. My wife and all of her friends growing up were bilingual. I spoke only English when we met. All of her friends thought their kids would speak Spanish. Most of them had bilingual husbands.
We are the only ones with fluent kids. It takes effort to make it happen. It doesn’t happen by accident, even living within a few minutes from the border.
It depends how big the puertorican community is lol. Jk.
I’d say most Latinos in my area speak Spanish because they are 1st, 2nd, or 3rd gen. I don’t think I’ve ever met a 4th gen immigrant or in the case of the southwest US, native Americans that speak Spanish. I think that’s why you see so many people that don’t speak Spanish. Their families have been speaking Spanish for ~400 years and now that English is the main language, they’re learning that. I’ve met a few people that don’t speak Spanish. Some people come here young and Spanish holds them back. So they learn English and stop using Spanish. This is especially true if their parents speak English.
In Texas I’d say most of my peers were first or second gen immigrants from Mexico. Most spoke Spanish.
My moms stepdad is Mexican (born & raised) and he prioritized making sure all his kids spoke family. So influential that now I speak Spanish despite having zero ancestral connection to any Spanish speaking country.
Here in LA, we have such a large Latino population. I hear Spanish everyday, and I speak a decent amount as a non Latino non native speaker. My buddies say their families didn’t speak to them in Spanish as a kid because they are like oh we’re American and now, kids gotta speak English. They can get better jobs, we don’t speak Spanish at home. That kinda thing.
East SF bay area; Yeah never.
A lot of the younger generation qualify as heritage speakers. They can get by with Spanish for domestic tasks, but since they did their entire education in English, their Spanish ability is going to be limited in more advanced settings (professional, academic, etc).
You could say the same for any person whose parents’ first language is not the one spoken locally.
None of the Brazilians near me speak Spanish.
In the area of Michigan I live in we have a fairly large Spanish-speaki g immigrant population, and often times I run into bilingual speakers, but I have met more than one person who is English only, even in an immigrant household. As much as this depends on generation, I think people who run in more affluent circles likely.lose it sooner because there is more integration with wealthier english-speaking people and less time spent among working class immigrants.
Depends I. The ethnicity. I knew a ton of Puerto Rican and Dominican kids who spoke no Spanish. For other Hispanic nationalities it is less common for them not to speak Spanish. Even the ones born here to assimilated parents will know at least a little Spanish.
I’m Mexican/American, I’m fluent in spanish and here in Colorado where I’m from there are a lot that don’t speak spanish. And it’s not just the younger generation, a lot of older people don’t either and it’s because back when they were younger it was frowned upon by a lot of people, so they were never taught.
Like others have said there’s a lot more 2nd, 3rd, etc generation Latinos in California. If their parents speak English then they have less of a reason to be speaking Spanish at home.
I’m from Southern California and I’d say about half of my friends who are Hispanic speak fluent Spanish whereas the other half grew up in a home that spoke English and don’t have any more Spanish skills than me (close to none). It really depends on the family and their dynamics and culture.
I live in California and it’s really common here. I have a lot of Latino friends that don’t speak Spanish or know only a little.
My ex wife has 100% Mexican kids and they can’t speak Spanish
Very common in Texas for Mexican-Americans who’ve been in the U.S. for multiple generations. It was very common in TX schools in the 60s/70s for kids to be punished for speaking Spanish. By the 3rd generation on it’s very common for most immigrant descendants to have lost their grandparents’ language. It’s no different than grandchildren of Italian immigrants not speaking Italian or grandchildren of Chinese not speaking Cantonese or Mandarin.
I’m third generation. My parents weren’t allowed to speak their language in school. My mother struggled academically then dropped out because of the language barrier. So it was not in their minds to teach us their language. Wasn’t till i was an adult that being bilingual was accepted and important.
Very common among children of immigrants who felt their accent held them back. I knew several people in college who had one Latina parent but never learned Spanish at home, specifically because their parent wanted them to have a pure American accent.
Side note: I’m white but speak fluent Spanish. When I came home from Iraq I was hyper vigilant for a while and constantly on the lookout for anything that seemed “out of place” as that was an indicator that something bad was about to happen.
One night I was in NYC and more than a few beers deep when I walked into a restaurant with a friend and ordered some tacos. I ordered in English, then switched to Spanish and specified no beans to the (clearly Latina) young woman behind the register, who replied that she didn’t speak Spanish. Pre-Iraq that would’ve been no big deal, but now my spidey sense was tingling. Why would a Latina working in a Mexican restaurant not speak Spanish? Was she an insurgent?
The way I remember what happened next, I was unnerved but I kindly asked for no beans (in English) and went to sit down. The way my friend remembers it I got eerily quiet, stared her down, and said “if you put any beans in my taco I will f***ing k*** you.”
Anyways, kind Latina woman who didn’t speak Spanish and worked at a restaurant somewhere in Manhattan in 2011, if you’re reading this I apologize.
Very common among children of immigrants who felt their accent held them back. I knew several people in college who had one Latina parent but never learned Spanish at home, specifically because their parent wanted them to have a pure American accent.
Side note: I’m white but speak fluent Spanish. When I came home from Iraq I was hyper vigilant for a while and constantly on the lookout for anything that seemed “out of place” as that was an indicator that something bad was about to happen.
One night I was in NYC and more than a few beers deep when I walked into a restaurant with a friend and ordered some tacos. I ordered in English, then switched to Spanish and specified no beans to the (clearly Latina) young woman behind the register, who replied that she didn’t speak Spanish. Pre-Iraq that would’ve been no big deal, but now my spidey sense was tingling. Why would a Latina working in a Mexican restaurant not speak Spanish? Was she an insurgent?
The way I remember what happened next, I was unnerved but I kindly asked for no beans (in English) and went to sit down. The way my friend remembers it I got eerily quiet, stared her down, and said “if you put any beans in my taco I will f***ing k*** you.”
Anyways, kind Latina woman who didn’t speak Spanish and worked at a restaurant somewhere in Manhattan in 2011, if you’re reading this I apologize.
Very common among children of immigrants who felt their accent held them back. I knew several people in college who had one Latina parent but never learned Spanish at home, specifically because their parent wanted them to have a pure American accent.
Side note: I’m white but speak fluent Spanish. When I came home from Iraq I was hyper vigilant for a while and constantly on the lookout for anything that seemed “out of place” as that was an indicator that something bad was about to happen.
One night I was in NYC and more than a few beers deep when I walked into a restaurant with a friend and ordered some tacos. I ordered in English, then switched to Spanish and specified no beans to the (clearly Latina) young woman behind the register, who replied that she didn’t speak Spanish. Pre-Iraq that would’ve been no big deal, but now my spidey sense was tingling. Why would a Latina working in a Mexican restaurant not speak Spanish? Was she an insurgent?
The way I remember what happened next, I was unnerved but I kindly asked for no beans (in English) and went to sit down. The way my friend remembers it I got eerily quiet, stared her down, and said “if you put any beans in my taco I will f***ing k*** you.”
Anyways, kind Latina woman who didn’t speak Spanish and worked at a restaurant somewhere in Manhattan in 2011, if you’re reading this I apologize.