BrainTrust Query: Will the Death of Spanish Bring About the Demise of Hispanic Marketing?
By David Morse, President and CEO, New American Dimensions, LLC
(www.newamericandimensions.com)
In the words of Benjamin Franklin, "In this world nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes." And a recently released study has demonstrated that, in the words of its authors, "Like taxes and biological death, linguistic death seems to be a sure thing in the United States, even for Mexicans living in Los Angeles, a city with one of the largest Spanish-speaking urban populations in the world."
The study, Linguistic Life Expectancies: Immigrant Language Retention in Southern California, draws from the merging of two large surveys, the Immigration and Intergenerational Mobility in Metropolitan Los Angeles (IIMMLA) survey and the third wave of the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study (CILS), resulting in a sample size of 5,703 respondents. Since the U.S. Census only distinguishes between native-born and foreign-born Americans, the study is a breakthrough in that it enables us to see linguistic capabilities to the third generation and beyond.
According to the authors' definition, a language is considered "born" in the United States with the arrival of first generation immigrants and "dead" when the percentage of immigrant descendents that either speak the language "very well" or prefer to speak that language at home declines to below 5 percent.
The study, conducted in Southern California, found that Hispanics did retain Spanish longer than other groups. For instance, in Generation 2.5 (U.S. born; one parent born in U.S. and one abroad), 35 percent of Mexicans, 29 percent of Salvadorans and Guatemalans, and 13 percent of other Hispanics still spoke Spanish very well. In contrast, the proportion of all other ethnicities speaking their mother tongue in generation 2.5 never exceeded 6 percent.
The study found that, despite the staying power of Spanish, only 17 percent of third generation Mexicans spoke Spanish fluently; the number dropped to 5 percent by the fourth generation.
Life expectancies for a language were even lower when language life was defined in terms of having a preference for using that language at home. According to the authors, "Spanish can be expected to die out after 2.0 generations among Mexicans, 2.1 generations among Guatemalans and Salvadorans, and 1.7 generations for other Latin Americans." Similarly, the average Asian language "can be expected to die out at or near the second generation."
Discussion Questions: In terms of generations, at what point should marketer's targeting ethnic consumers switch to English? Can there be effective Hispanic Marketing with anyone but a Spanish-speaking immigrant population?
The authors of the study take issue with Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington who argued in his 2004 book Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity that "the persistent in-flow of Hispanic immigrants threatens to divide the United States into two peoples, two cultures, and two languages. Unlike past immigrant groups, Mexicans and other Latinos have not assimilated into mainstream U.S. culture... rejecting the Anglo-Protestant values that built the American dream."
Interestingly, many of those arguing the most vehemently about the resilience of Spanish are in the Hispanic marketing community. José Cancela of the marketing firm Hispanic USA wrote that "Latinos are breaking the mold, clinging to their Spanish-language roots," adding that "English connects with our brains, but Spanish connects with our hearts." He's not alone in this camp. Hispanic agencies have a lot to lose if and when English becomes the "language of the heart" for Hispanics.
But there is a seismic shift going on in the Hispanic marketing industry that threatens to leave the Jose Cancelas in the lurch. In a recent speech, Carl Kravetz, the newly installed president of the Association of Hispanic Advertising Agencies (AHAA) said, "We can no longer allow language... the Spanish language to be precise... to be the primary reason to market to Hispanics." Marketing to Hispanics is about Latino identity, which he says is "complex, fluid, dynamic and ever changing. And this is our new language."