As a Professor of English, I Have to Say...

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

27. There has always been a tension with the children

of immigrants about learning/speaking/keeping the parents' language, and moving to English only.

My mother was born in 1916 on Long Island to Irish immigrant parents. (Thanks to the English colonization of their island, they arrived speaking only English.) Most of her childhood classmates had parents whose first language was something other than English, and I recall my mom talking about the fact that so many of them more or less refused to learn the home language.

I have a good friend who is Italian on his mother's side, Slovak on his father's. Both parents were born here but grew up speaking both languages. My friend learned Italian as a child because there were still so many of the older relatives still around, although his two younger brothers didn't learn it. But his father never spoke Slovak. He said that he was an American, and that his children only needed English. Mind you, he didn't object to their learning Italian, but had not interest in teaching his home language to his children. That's a shame, I think.

And actually, there were lots of our soldiers in WWII who were fluent in other languages. Maybe not as many as there could have been, but still, plenty.