How Immigration Will Affect American English in the Coming Decades

*If you look with specific intent you’ll find many stories like this one, that tell of the way Latinos are transforming the U.S., as we ourselves are being transformed. I like this story because it’s as fun as it is interesting. Can you imagine the ways our U.S. language will change because of the immigrant influence? VL

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By Mike Pearl, VICE

According to a Pew study from late last year, thanks to immigration, the US is going to change quite a bit over the next 50 years. One in three people will be an immigrant or a child of immigrants instead of the current one in four. The population will also be eight percent more Asian and six percent more hispanic. That sets the scene for a lot of changes in the way people will talk.

When people show up and start having their way with the local language, pidgins—or hybrid languages—form, typically remaining isolated, like Louisiana French Creole did. And as the linguist William Lavov pointed out in the 60s and 70s, regional dialects aren’t wrong; they’re just part of the natural changes that happen to every language over time.

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French Creole never really made it into American English, but Ilan Stavans, an Amherst College English professor, lexicographer, and linguistics pundit, suspects that some of the Spanish being spoken in the US will cross over into the mainstream in the next few decades. Some of what will creep in, he thinks, will be some of the more common words derived from Spanglish—which isn’t a language, but a term for various English-Spanish hybrids. I chatted with him to find out what kind of changes are in store for the American way of speaking, despite President Trump’s best efforts to stop them. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

VICE: Hi Ilan! How do you see English changing in the next 50 years?
Ilan Stavans: DuBois called the 20th Century the century that was going to be defined by the color line. I think the 21st Century no doubt is the century that’s going to be defined by the immigration line.

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[Photo courtesy of VICE]

Suggested reading

In this collection of short and flash fiction, Daniel Chacón examines peoples’ interactions with each other, the impact of identity and the importance of literature, art and music.

In one story, a girl remembers her father, who taught her to love books and libraries. “A book can whisper at you, call at you from the shelves. Sometimes a book can find you. Seek you out and ask you to come and play,” he told her. Years later, she finds herself pulling an assortment from the shelves, randomly reading passages from different books and entering into the landscapes as if each book were a wormhole. Somehow one excerpt seems to be a continuation of another, connecting in the way that birds do when they fly from a tree to the roof of a house, making “an idea, a connection, a tree-house.”

Misconceptions about people, the responsibility of the artist and conflicts about identity pepper these stories that take place in the U.S. and abroad. In “Mais, Je Suis Chicano,” a Mexican American living in Paris identifies himself as Chicano, rather than American. “It’s not my fault I was born on the U.S. side of the border,” he tells a French Moroccan woman when she discovers that he really is American, a word she says “as if it could be replaced with murderer or child molester.”

Many of the stories are very short and contain images that flash in the reader’s mind, loop back and connect to earlier ones. Other stories are longer, like rooms, into which Chacón invites the reader to enter, look around and hang out. And some are more traditional. But whether short or long, conventional or experimental, the people in these pieces confront issues of imagination and self. In “Sábado Gigante,” a young boy who is “as big as a gorilla” must face his best friend’s disappointment that—in spite of his size—he’s a terrible athlete, and even more confounding, he prefers playing dolls to baseball. Whether in Paris or Ciudad Juárez, Chacón reveals his characters at their most vulnerable in these powerful and rewarding stories, anti-stories and loops.

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