Chinese language in the United States

Language acquisition

Chinese Americans teach their children Chinese for a variety of reasons, such as preservation of a unique identity, pride in their cultural ancestry, desire for easy communication with Chinese-speaking family members, and the perception that Chinese will be a useful language as China's economic strength increases. Cantonese, historically the language of most Chinese immigrants, was the third most widely spoken non-English language in the United States in 2004. Many Chinese schools have been established to accomplish these goals. Most of them have classes only once a week on the weekends, however especially in the past there have been schools that met every day after normal school.

While approximately 9% of Chinese-born immigrants speak only English at home, this proportion may reach as high as 90% by the third generation living in the United States. While usage of Chinese at home, community connections, extracurriculars, and explicit instruction may help mitigate loss of Chinese language proficiency in young Chinese immigrants, the prevalence of English as a majority language in the United States means that many second and third generation Chinese Americans have limited or no ability to speak or read Chinese.

Because all Chinese languages are tonal, monolingual speakers of English often have difficulty producing Chinese tones and may have a pronounced accent or impaired ability to recognize tones in speech. Chinese orthography is also uniquely challenging to acquire fluency in, with each character representing an entire phonosemantic domain, rather than sounds that can be reasoned out piecemeal, as in an alphabet or syllabary.

Chinese immigrants may face competing sociocultural interests in maintaining fluency in Chinese and enforcing Chinese language use among their children. Some Chinese Americans view Chinese language fluency as a core part of a Chinese cultural identity and may opt to use only Chinese in the home or forbid the use of English. Other families view English proficiency and assimilation as key to their children's future success. The status of Asian Americans, and more specifically Chinese Americans as "perpetual foreigners" may be a contributing factor behind the desire for some Chinese Americans to achieve or raise their children towards monolingual English fluency at the expense of Chinese fluency.

These desires are often at odds with the attested benefits of bilingualism, including a stronger sense of cultural identity and social norms, lower incidence of behavioral issues, and ability to comfortably navigate both English and Chinese speaking contexts.

Chinese as a foreign language

A 2006 survey by the Modern Language Association found that Chinese accounted for 3% of foreign language class enrollment in the United States, making it the seventh most commonly learned foreign languages in the United States. Most Chinese as foreign language classes teach simplified characters and Standard Mandarin Chinese.