By Beatriz Pascual Macias

 

Washington, Mar 24 (EFE).- Six out of every 10 Hispanics in the United States speak English or are bilingual, though adults born to an immigrant family are most likely to communicate easily in both English and Spanish, according to a new study published Tuesday by the Pew Research Center.

 

The center found that 36 percent of Hispanics in the United States are bilingual, 25 percent chiefly use English to communicate and 38 percent speak most often in Spanish, percentages that vary according to age and the length of time the immigrants have been in the country.

 

“The more time Latino immigrants have been in the country, the more probable it is they will use English more, even as they gradually lose command of their native tongue,” Jens Manuel Krogstad, one of the authors of the study, told Efe.

 

According to Krogstad, bilingualism is linked to age, so that 42 percent of Hispanics between ages 18 and 29 are bilingual, a figure that drops to a third among Hispanics between ages 30 and 64, though it increases up to 40 percent among those over 65.

 

This bilingualism has favored the popularity of Spanglish, an English-Spanish hybrid spoken by 70 percent of Hispanics between ages 16-25, according to Pew, which interviewed 5,000 adults nationwide for its National Surveys of Latinos.

 

“In the future, and as the younger generations born in the United States grow, more English will be spoken and less the native tongue,” as occurred with families of Italian, German and Polish immigrants who came to this country, the researcher said.

 

According to his data, 60 percent of Latinos born outside the United States speak Spanish, while 8 percent of Hispanics born of immigrant parents can get along in that language, a figure that drops to 1 percent in the case of third-generation Latinos.

 

“That 1 percent does not mean that third-generation Latinos don’t speak Spanish. It means the 1 percent speaks mostly Spanish. But they all speak Spanish a lot. A fourth of third-generation Latinos are bilingual,” the researcher said.

 

Krogstad noted that 95 percent of Hispanic adults consider it essential that future generations be capable of speaking Spanish, though they also give great importance to English.

 

In fact, “fully 87% said Latino immigrants need to learn English to succeed,” the Pew Research Center’s study found.

 

“Due in part to bilingualism,” the study says, “in 2013 Spanish was the most spoken non-English language in the U.S.”

 

Spanish is “used by 35.8 million Hispanics in the U.S. plus an additional 2.6 million non-Hispanics,” according to Pew. EFE