It takes more than a language to unify a nation

[Dennis Baron]

Exactly, Joel.  John Higham's classic work on American immigration
paints a far from lovely-melting-pot picture of how things worked in
the early 1900s.  But perhaps his most interesting point, for this
forum, is the conclusion that many of the immigrants who were
successful (and there were many who were not) succeeded not because
of English or education.  Instead, they initially managed to thrive
-- using their native language -- within their immigrant communities,
perhaps as small shopkeepers or entrepreneurs, and later combined the
socioeconomic skills they learned there and move out into more
general American society -- yes, they had some English when they
moved out, but they were hardly fluent.  Even English-speaking
immigrants (from Wales, Ireland, and England itself) didn't
necessarily thrive, and many, like their nonanglophone peers, dropped
out of school early, and often.   Many of my own immigrant relatives,
reasonably well-versed in English along with Yiddish and Romanian,
were by any standard of measurement total economic failures.

Dennis


At 2/24/2007 03:32 PM, Gerald Cohen wrote:
>      No system is perfect, but the vision of the U.S. as a melting
> pot worked well for our grandparents and greatgrandparents, and it
> might not be so bad for the present either.

I wonder whether historians of that period would agree.

Joel

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org