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Anyone who felt the ice was thinning regarding the controversial nature of bilingualism education took it on the chin after the fallout from Coke's recent Super Bowl commercial featuring "America the Beautiful" sung in eight languages. Yeah, there are still plenty of myopic folks who simply believe, "Either speak English or leave."

Still, there are cracks in the anti-bilingual wall in terms of K-12 education with California legislators currently debating the elimination of Prop 227, which in 1998 effectively ended bilingual education in that state.

Florida International University Assistant Professor of Linguistics Phillip M. Carter told VOXXI the irony is the smoking gun in favor of bilingual education is tied directly to Prop 227's effect in Northern California, where such programs were allowed if more than 50 percent of parents signed waivers.

"There are very successful bilingual education programs in San Francisco City Schools for languages like Mandarin and Japanese," Carter said. "The data from those programs is very, very good. Those students do better than their peers in non-bilingual programs within the same district."

The reason why bilingual education programs produce higher-achieving students has to do with cognitive benefits such as enhanced understanding of mathematics, creativity and selective retention.

What's currently being proposed in California is to allow bilingual education, thus benefiting millions of Spanish speaking students who right now are taking English-only classes.

"The proposal is for dual language immersion (DLI) programs, which differ slightly from bilingual education programs," Carter said. "The goal is to give students education in all core areas in both languages - acquiring English and maintaining the home language if you're an immigrant student or acquiring the second language and maintaining English if you're U.S. born."

He added that DLI programs, which begin with young children, actually increase the cognitive benefits for students. This also effectively dispels the introduction of foreign language study in high school.

"You get less benefits the older you are when you learn the language, so that means it makes very little sense to block use of both languages until high school," Carter said. "That's a huge missed opportunity, not only for Latino students who come to school probably speaking Spanish and they forget it, but also in terms of the cognitive benefits all students regardless of language background will receive."

One of the more devastating byproducts of the bilingual education debate is its affect on the Latino family, which sends kids to school to learn English. The result is not only do the young students lose their cultural heritage and the ability to speak to their extended family in their native tongue, but deny themselves career opportunities.

"There's an astounding number of cascading effect on Latino families where parents and grandparents only speak Spanish and kids who only speak English or have receptive bilingualism, where they can understand their parents but aren't comfortable responding in Spanish," Carter said. "That's how language attrition takes place.

"Which you can say, 'OK, who cares? Do we need Spanish in the U.S.?' And you can say, 'Yeah, we do.' It's good for the students, and it's good for the local economies. Imagine if all of the millions of U.S. Latinos had full education in both languages, what kind of economic benefit that would usher in. It would be tremendous."

It's one thing to be able to communicate bilingually but what's lost on, say, Latino students who no longer study Spanish is literacy - these are skills that are desperately needed in places such as Southern California, the southwest and Miami.

Considering a bilingual education benefits all students - Latinos, African Americans, whites - Carter remains hopeful the concept will soon be embraced by all sides.

"The page is turning on account of globalization," Carter said. "I think that people from across the political spectrum are recognizing the globalizing forces on the economy and political systems of putting people in contact with one another from diverse places in ways that are unprecedented."

"Despite that inherent political nature of language issues, I think the tide is turning and people are starting to say 'OK, yes, actually this does make sense.'"

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The Fight For Bilingual Education Programs In The U.S.

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The Fight For Bilingual Education Programs In The U.S.

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With more than 37 million speakers, Spanish is by far the most spoken non-English language in the U.S. today among people ages 5 and older. It is also one of the fastest-growing, with the number of speakers up 233% since 1980, when there were 11 million Spanish speakers. (The number of Vietnamese speakers grew faster, up 599% over the same period).

As Spanish use has grown, driven primarily by Hispanic immigration and population growth, it has become a part of many aspects of life in the U.S. For example, Spanish is spoken by more non-Hispanics in U.S. homes than any other non-English language and Spanish language television networks frequently beat their English counterparts in television ratings.

But what's the future of Spanish?

According to a 2011 paper by U.S. Census Bureau Demographers Jennifer Ortman and Hyon B. Shin, the number of Spanish speakers is projected to rise through 2020 to anywhere between 39 million and 43 million, depending on the assumption one makes about immigration. Most of these Spanish speakers will be Hispanic, with Ortman and Shin projecting between 37.5 million and 41 million Hispanic Spanish speakers by 2020.

Ortman and Shin provide two other projections, both of which highlight the changing demographics of the nation's Hispanic population and the rising importance of U.S. births rather than the arrival of new immigrants to Hispanic population growth.

Today, three-fourths of all Hispanics ages 5 and older speak Spanish. However, that share is projected to fall to about two-thirds in 2020. The share of Hispanics that speak Spanish reached 78% in the 2000s.

As the share of Hispanics who speak Spanish falls, the share that speaks only English at home is expected to rise. About a third (34%) of Hispanics will speak only English at home by 2020, up from 25% in 2010, according to Ortman and Shin.

The story of the Spanish language in the U.S. is still unfolding. Whether it follows the same pattern of decline in use as other non-English languages, such as Italian, German or Polish, remains to be seen. ( The number of Italian, German and Polish speakers in the U.S. declined 55.2%, 32.7% and 25.9% between 1980 and 2010, even though the number of Americans who trace their ancestry to Germany, Poland or Italy grew over the same period.)

Nonetheless, the path that Spanish takes could be different. A 2012 Pew Research Hispanic Trends Project report showed 95% of Hispanic adults-including those born in the U.S.-said it is important that future generations of Hispanic speak Spanish. And today's young Hispanics are more likely than their parents to say they hear messages about the importance of speaking Spanish. But among Hispanics, use of English when consuming news media, television entertainment, music or speaking it is on the rise.

Topics: Hispanic/Latino Demographics, Hispanic/Latino Identity, Language

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What is the future of Spanish in the United States?

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With more than 37 million speakers, Spanish is by far the most spoken non-English language in the U.S. today among people ages 5 and older. It is also one of the fastest-growing, with the number of speakers up 233% since 1980, when there were 11 million Spanish speakers.

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Religion in America

By all accounts, Hispanics are the future of Catholicism in America. Already, most young Roman Catholics in the United States are Hispanic, and soon that will be true of the overall Catholic population. But the Hispanicization of American Catholicism faces a big challenge: Hispanics are leaving Catholicism at a striking rate.

It has been clear for years that Catholicism, both in the United States and Latin America, has been losing adherents to evangelical Protestantism, and, in particular, to Pentecostal and other charismatic churches. But as an increasing percentage of the American Hispanic population is made up of people born in this country, a simultaneous, competing form of faith-switching is also underway: More American Hispanics are leaving Catholicism and becoming religiously unaffiliated.

The seemingly mind-bending result: Even as a rising percentage of American Catholics is Hispanic, a falling percentage of American Hispanics is Catholic.

Nearly one-quarter of Hispanics in the United States are former Catholics, according to a poll released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center. By comparison, about 10 percent of all Americans are former Catholics, according to a Pew survey released in 2008; the difference is partly explained by the fact that a much higher fraction of Hispanics started as Catholics.

The religious affiliation of Hispanics is of enormous significance to those interested in the future of religion in the United States, because Hispanics make up such a large and growing fraction of the nation's population. Almost all Hispanic immigrants arrive from countries that are predominantly Catholic, so the religious choices made by Hispanics are particularly significant for the Catholic Church.

Earlier this week, Boston College released a survey of parishes showing that American Hispanic Catholics have higher participation rates in sacramental activities - Mass, baptisms, first communions - but lower participation rates in other aspects of parish life than do other American Catholics. Now comes the Pew poll, which finds faith-switching common and multidirectional, with no simple explanation.

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The Rev. Jorge Ortiz-Garay at a Spanish Mass at St. Joseph's Co-Cathedral in Brooklyn. A majority of American Catholics may soon be Hispanic. Credit Michael Nagle for The New York Times

Over all, Pew finds that 55 percent of Hispanics in the United States identified themselves as Catholic in 2013, down from 67 percent in 2010. About 22 percent of Hispanics identify as Protestant - including 16 percent who say they are evangelical or born-again - and 18 percent say they are unaffiliated.

"It's surprising partly because of the size of the decline in a short period," said Cary Funk, a senior researcher at Pew. "We're seeing an increase in religious pluralism among Hispanics, and also greater polarization on the religious spectrum."

The Pew survey was conducted in English and Spanish with 5,103 Hispanic adults in the United States; the telephone poll was done by landline and cellphone in the spring and summer of last year, and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.

Previous research has noted that Hispanics in the United States are leaving religion as they assimilate to a more broadly secular culture. The Pew poll finds the rise in the number of Hispanics who say they are unaffiliated particularly pronounced among Hispanics under age 30, and it comes at a time when more and more Americans are becoming part of what religion researchers call "the nones," people who say they are not affiliated with a religious tradition.

Asked why they left their childhood faith, the two most often-cited responses were that they just "drifted away," or that they stopped believing in church teachings.

​The Catholic Church has been working for years to increase its ministry to Hispanics. In a blog post this week, Sister Mary Ann Walsh, the spokeswoman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, noted that the church is now requiring many seminarians to learn Spanish, that there has been an increase in the number of Hispanic deacons, and that ​​there are Hispanic bishops heading several large dioceses, including in Los Angeles, San Antonio, Sacramento and San Diego.​

But she acknowledged the challenge.

"​Everyone, including Hispanics, and especially young ones, can fall prey to what has become a new American problem, religious relativism, where, perhaps inspired by exciting music or a rousing preacher, you move from your parents' church to another to no church at all," she wrote. She added, "It is scary to consider that religious relativism may be the greatest threat that exists to the increasingly important Hispanic Catholic community."

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: Even as U.S. Hispanics Lift Catholicism, Many Are Leaving the Church Behind. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Even as U.S. Hispanics Lift Catholicism, Many Are Leaving the Church Behind

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Religion in America By all accounts, Hispanics are the future of Catholicism in America. Already, most young Roman Catholics in the United States are Hispanic, and soon that will be true of the overall Catholic population. But the Hispanicization of American Catholicism faces a big challenge: Hispanics are leaving Catholicism at a striking rate.

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El aborto es un tema candente en este momento en los Estados Unidos debido a los funcionarios recién elegidos. Hay muchos latinos que son católicos, 55 por ciento en 2013. La familia es muy importante en las comunidades latinas. Los tiempos están cambiando. Pienso que las segundas y terceras generaciones de hablantes de español pueden, en algunos casos, perder o ir en contra de algunas de las tradiciones religiosas de sus padres. Esta es una generalización y no tengo hechos que lo demuestren, pero es interesante pensar. Las personas tienen diferentes definiciones y diferentes razones para practicar la religión, pero debido a la fuerte vinculación que muchas familias latinas tienen con la religión, podría haber una correlación debido a la pérdida de la tradición.

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Es muy importante que haya una investigación continua sobre el español y cómo se está utilizando en los Estados Unidos. Con la investigación anterior que ha sido conducida por muchos académicos importantes somos capaces de entender mejor los dialectos diferentes y cómo se utilizan.
Pienso que es muy interesante cómo en ciertas áreas de los Estados Unidos, el uso del lenguaje comienza a declinar con la segunda generación y es casi dispeared con la tercera generación. Existen excepciones obvias porque todavía se están realizando estudios.