Home > Multicultural America: > French Americans

AS waves of Europeans immigrated to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most could barely speak English. Some knew only fragments, others none at all. One of the biggest tasks of assimilation was simply learning to speak. Because children always find languages easier to learn than adults, immigrants' children swiftly became more adept than their parents, and second generation immigrants' English was indistinguishable from that of the third and fourth generations. Even well beyond the mid-twentieth century, one still heard the thick accents of first-generation immigrants, especially in eastern cities like New York.

Language skills had significance in society as well, where they were often marked as a means of dating an immigrant's arrival and establishing a social pecking order. Eager to be seen as Americans, immigrants commonly tried to hide their linguistic origins. Many households...