Cities with least assimilation/most cultural retention among immigrant generations?

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by Docere

All of which are in Cook County, no?

Oops, I misread "collar counties". I thought you were referring to inner suburbia.

[bossabreezes]

I live in New York, and I think this city is an interesting mix of being both very assimilated but also extremely non-assimilated.

There are huge ethic enclaves in every boro, which maintain their identity in restaurants/stores/markets and the like. This will never change, as NYC is a hub of immigration from all over the world and will likely always be.

However, there is an attitude and way of being that comes quickly to anyone who lives here for more than a few years. You adapt to the city, which can be a very difficult place to live at times. You become quick on your toes, share a certain type of morbid humor, and understand the way the city works and how it can chew you up and spit you out in a second. I'm used to it, so much so that I have a hard time imagining living anywhere else.

People assimilate to the culture of the city, but maintain their own culture as well, as many enclaves have tons of residents who don't speak a word of English.

[Capsicum]

There seems to be an impression that the Midwest (and South, though much of the newer Southern cities are cosmopolitan like Houston and Atlanta now) is more assimilationist than the East and West coasts.

The Midwest seems to be where ethnic white Americans assimilate to just "American", more than the east coast. But that might just be impression, and the fact that the Midwest doesn't have as much recent immigration (or even in places where there is, like Chicago, it's not geographically far from many towns where people are far from the immigrant experience in terms of family ties).

[Capsicum]

Originally Posted by Capsicum

Stats for Canada regarding losing immigrant languages over generations (I'd like to find this for particular cities):

Extinction table of immigrant languages as mother tongues from first to third generation in Canada, 1981 and 2006

Percentage of first, second and third generation who speak their mother's mother tongue.

German 100, 24, 5
Portuguese 100, 56, 8
Spanish 100, 41, 12
Italian 100, 52, 11
Greek 100, 62, 26
Serbo-Croatian 100, 51, 12
Polish 100, 34, 6
Hungarian 100, 27, 3
Pundjabi 100, 64, 33
Chinese 100, 61, 14
Other 100, 19, 4
Total 100, 41, 10,

Source: http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/11-008-...tbl004-eng.htm

Not sure if there's similar data for the US reported somewhere (I'd bet the percentage declining for Spanish over the generations would likely be less).

Looks like my hunch is correct by quite a bit! Not sure how comparable it is to the wording in the Canadian question, but almost half of third-generation Hispanics/Latinos still speaking Spanish to their kids certainly is something.


http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank...t-generations/



I don't think any minority non-French, non-English, language in Canada has this amount of retention.