European Tertiary Languages in America

Yes, English and Spanish are European languages, however, for the purposes of this article, they will be omitted to highlight less commonly known European linguistic communities. There are countless more that will not be listed either for brevity’s sake.

Americans are considered a widely monolingual population. While that is true for the most part in modern times, there are rich linguistic histories of the many peoples that inhabit this country.

German, French, Italian, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Scandinavian languages, Yiddish, and others were once spoken across vast swaths of the country, often functioning as the primary languages of neighborhoods, schools, churches, labor unions, and local media. In such places, sometimes English was secondary or even unnecessary, or even producing a hybrid mix of both languages.

Yet by the early 21st Century, only a small number of these European heritage languages remain viable as community languages. Most survive only symbolically, embedded in foods, surnames, festivals, and regional lexicon. This outcome is often attributed to “assimilation” as a natural process. In reality, it followed predictable structural pathways shaped by immigration timing, settlement geography, institutional incentives, and the distinctive character of American language policy.

An Overview of American Language Policy

Immigrant languages were generally permitted in private spaces but were rarely supported or promoted by public institutions (a notable exception being bilingual German schooling in the Midwest before WWI). English was never declared the official language (until 2025 by executive order), yet it functioned as the sole language of political participation and economic advancement.

As compulsory schooling expanded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the boundary between private and public life narrowed dramatically. English increasingly dominated not only civic institutions but everyday life. Language shift, under these conditions, was incentivized by a desire for social equality and mobility. The decisive question for immigrant communities became whether their language was structurally necessary or merely culturally meaningful. Each community faced unique contexts that catered to language preservation or extinction.

The Industrial Mass Migration and the Collapse of Language Transmission

Between the 1880s and the early 1920s, millions of Italians, Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, Scandinavians, and Eastern European Jews arrived in the United States. This migration coincided with rapid industrialization, and most newcomers settled in factory cities and mining regions such as Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and New York.

Cities differed fundamentally from rural frontiers. They required constant cross-ethnic interaction, and factories, labor unions, public schools, courts, and municipal politics operated overwhelmingly in English. Even dense ethnic neighborhoods could not monopolize daily life linguistically. English was not merely dominant; it was functionally required. This structural reality explains why language shift accelerated rapidly among urban European immigrants, even where ethnic density and institutional completeness were extraordinarily high.

Polish

No case illustrates this dynamic more clearly than Chicago’s Polish community. As Dominic A. Pacyga demonstrated in American Warsaw, Chicago became one of, if not the largest Polish city in the world outside of Poland. More than fifty Polish Catholic parishes dotted the city, alongside Polish schools, newspapers, radio programs, fraternal organizations, labor unions, and political networks. Polish could often be heard on the streets, frequently in a hybridized form known as "Po Chicagosku".

Polish identity flourished precisely because it did not require linguistic exclusivity. Ethnicity became elective, expressed through religion, food, music, and public symbolism, while English governed the domains that mattered most for advancement.

Polish was culturally meaningful but structurally optional. Once immigration slowed after the Immigration Act of 1924, intergenerational transmission waned. Polish, once among the most widely spoken non-English languages in the United States, has declined steadily since the late twentieth century.

That said, there are a couple different programs and movements to reverse this trajectory.

Italians

Italian-Americans followed an even faster path to language loss than the Poles. Between the 1880s and 1920s, millions arrived speaking dozens of regional dialects rather than a standardized Italian. In American cities, these varieties mixed with one another and with English, producing unstable hybrid speech forms that lacked institutional reinforcement.

At the same time, unlike other European immigrants, Italians were gradually incorporated into American whiteness, particularly in the urban North and on the West Coast. English became the language of education, property ownership, political participation, and middle-class respectability. Retaining Italian offered no structural advantage and often carried stigma. Since 1980, it had lost roughly two-thirds of its American speakers, though Italian culture endured and morphed into one of the most pervasively distinct cultures in the USA that long since diverted from its European roots.

Italian is on the list of AP (advanced placement) high school language courses, showing it has at least some mainstream institutional backing.

Czechs, Hungarians, and Scandinavians

Czechs, Hungarians, Poles, and Scandinavians followed nearly identical trajectories. Large numbers arrived, built communities with churches and newspapers, and briefly maintained bilingual schooling. Once immigration slowed and public education standardized around English, rapid language shift followed. Scandinavian Lutheran churches transitioned to English to retain younger congregants, while Hungarian communities in Ohio collapsed linguistically despite dense settlement. Texas Czechs persisted longer due to rural concentration but declined sharply after World War II. In each case, the decisive factor was not ethnic pride or numerical strength but necessity. Once English became the sole language of opportunity, they faded. There are exceptions, and some communities, though small, continue to speak these languages.

Surviving the Odds: Texas German and Cajun French

Texas German and Cajun French are unique in that they survived English assimilation. They were deeply entrenched regionally before national linguistic standardization took hold. In both cases, heritage languages dominated local life before compulsory English schooling expanded.

Their decline was affected by policy: wartime repression in Texas regarding German and punitive school practices in Louisiana actively discouraged French use, curating permeating stigma towards these communities. Census data shows that both now have extremely low rates of child transmission though recent cultural revival has reinvigorated efforts to keep them alive.

Structural Enforcement and the Exception of Religious Communities

Only communities that enforced language internally escaped this pattern. Pennsylvania Dutch (Pennsylvania German) survives because it is so heavily ingrained in Amish and Mennonite communities. The language functions as a boundary marker in tandem with religious separatism. Participation in community life requires the ability to speak PA Dutch.

Crucially, these communities do not seek integration through the state. By minimizing interaction with public institutions, they effectively exit the dominant-language regime. High birth rates and internal transmission allow it to grow.

Yiddish complicates the story of European languages in America by introducing a distinct outcome. Between the 1880s and 1920s, New York became the largest Yiddish-speaking city in the world. Yiddish functioned not only as a home language but as the language of newspapers, theaters, labor movements, political debate, and everyday commerce.

As secular Jewish communities shifted rapidly to English in the second and third generations, Yiddish ceased to function as a full community language yet it did not vanish. Instead, it became a substrate language, reshaping New York English itself. Words such as schlep, kvetch, nosh, chutzpah, mensch, and schmooze entered everyday American English and Yiddish-inflected intonation, sarcasm, and rhetorical style became hallmarks of New York speech. At the same time, Yiddish continued to thrive within Hasidic and Haredi communities, where the language remains dominant.

Russian

Russian follows a different path. Russian-speaking communities in the United States have been continuously replenished through imperial-era refugees, Cold War émigrés, post-Soviet migration, and ongoing transnational movement. Russian-language schools, media, and churches remain viable because new speakers constantly arrive. Census data shows that Russian is one of the few European languages to grow substantially since 1980. Its survival depends not on insulation, but on demographic renewal. Without replenishment, Russian would likely follow the same trajectory as earlier European languages.

What the Census Confirms

Federal data leaves little ambiguity: European immigrant languages decline predictably once immigration slows. English acquisition among children is rapid, universal, and highly effective. Cultural pride alone does not prevent language shift. Only enforcement, replenishment, or early regional dominance slows decline. Languages that justified themselves socially, through belief, isolation, or continuous renewal, endured. Languages that became optional or strictly symbolic faded. Language loss was rarely just coercion; it was frequently the by-product of assimilation out of ethnic enclaves over generations.

Language	Speakers (2019)	Trend Since 1980	Notes
French (incl. Cajun/Creole)	2.10 million	▲ Moderate growth	Sustained by immigration + Louisiana heritage
German	0.90 million	▼ Decline	Historically dominant; now aging communities
Italian	0.54 million	▼ Sharp decline	−67% since 1980
Portuguese	0.85 million	▲ Growth	Brazilian & Portuguese immigration
Russian	0.94 million	▲ Strong growth	Post-Soviet migration
Polish	0.51 million	▼ Decline	Older Midwestern/Northeast settlements
Greek	0.26 million	▼ Decline	Stable but aging
Yiddish	0.18 million	▼ Long-term decline (recent rebound)	Growth since 2000 among Orthodox communities
Serbo-Croatian	0.24 million	▲ Slight growth	1990s Balkan migration
Armenian	0.24 million	▲ Growth	Concentrated in CA
Other Slavic (incl. Ukrainian)	0.32 million	▲ Growth	Regional grouping
Other West Germanic (e.g., Dutch, PA Dutch)	0.38 million	▲ Growth	Includes heritage varieties

References:

Boas, Hans C. The Life and Death of Texas German. Duke University Press, 2018.

Bodnar, John. The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America. Indiana University Press, 1985.

Bukowczyk, John J. Polish Americans and Their History. Wayne State University Press, 1996.

Cummins, Jim. Bilingualism and Special Education: Issues in Assessment and Pedagogy. Multilingual Matters, 1981.

Fishman, Joshua A. Language Loyalty in the United States. Mouton, 1966.

Fishman, Joshua A. “Language Maintenance and Language Shift.” Language in the USA, edited by Charles A. Ferguson and Shirley Brice Heath, Cambridge University Press, 1981, pp. 123–147.

Gabaccia, Donna R. Italy’s Many Diasporas. University of Washington Press, 2000.

Guglielmo, Thomas A. White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890–1945. Oxford University Press, 2003.

Gurock, Jeffrey S. Orthodox Jews in America. Indiana University Press, 2009.

Katsnelson, Anna Wexler. “Russian Immigration and Language Maintenance in the United States.” Journal of Slavic Linguistics, vol. 22, no. 2, 2014, pp. 233–258.

Kloss, Heinz. The American Bilingual Tradition. Center for Applied Linguistics, 1977.

Louden, Mark L. Pennsylvania Dutch: The Story of an American Language. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016.

Pacyga, Dominic A. American Warsaw: The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of Polish Chicago. University of Chicago Press, 2019.

Texas State Historical Association. “Czech Texans.” Handbook of Texas Online, TSHA, www.tshaonline.org.

U.S. Census Bureau. Language Use in the United States: 2019. American Community Survey Reports, U.S. Department of Commerce, 2020.

Valdman, Albert. French and Creole in Louisiana. Plenum Press, 1997.

Weinreich, Max. History of the Yiddish Language. Translated by Shlomo Noble and Joshua A. Fishman, University of Chicago Press, 1980.