Why did the Spanish language survive in the US but not German

Think how southern Europeans were once considered different but are now just considered white.

In 1915 the revived KKK excluded "Nordics" as well as Mediterranean and Slavic types from the club house. A decade later most Klaverns had relaxed that, as long as the individual acted like "True American" and could pass as a WASP at the country club or small town church social. By 1925 some Klavern leaders were even trying to reconcile with Catholics.
 
I think bilingualism is more complex than whether it's accepted or not. I believe as humans we're more innately comfortable to communicate in one language or the other. ...

It's a practical matter in business. If you have business regularly with another language group it's useful to have a working knowledge of it.

Technical languages are a form of bilingualism. I've been fluent in a few of those. The vocabulary made the conversation near incomprehensible to outsiders & in at least one case the grammar varied
 
German never persisted due to its similarities with English (they belong same Germanic language family), so the former speakers have had to be absorbed by the latter dominant one by the virtue of language similarities like what happened to Italian dialects in Argentina where descendants of Italians ultimately became Hispanophones.

I don't think the similarities of German to English had much to do with it. Languages much less similar to English than German is have also declined in the US--e.g., Polish. The main factor is the relative lack of new immigrants.
 

Driftless

Donor
You need a cohesive local community that speaks the common language on a near daily basis, or the fluency decreases with the passage of time. An overstatement, but you most often speak what you hear....
 
Prohibition also discouraged German speakers.
After the anti-German sentiment during WW1, prohibition was a further attempt at assimilating immigrants. Prohibitionists vigorously campaigned against German-style beer gardens.
When you publicly suppress a language for 20-some-odd years, it falls out of common usage.

As an aside, my mother tongue is English and I struggled to learn French during high school. As an adult, I have studied both German and Spanish, finding Spanish much simpler to learn.
 
I don't think the similarities of German to English had much to do with it. Languages much less similar to English than German is have also declined in the US--e.g., Polish. The main factor is the relative lack of new immigrants.

Also in Namibia it's often said that the similarity of German and Afrikaans is a contributing factor to why German has survived.
 
If we have a USA that does not go to war and does not achieve anything like the anti-German sentiment, can we keep German a living language? And if German survives as a popular at home or local usage language will we see Italian, Russian or Polish better survive in their communities for example? I suspect we might see Prohibition fail, or at least only prohibit spirits, thus German culture is also less disrupted, and does that further the usage of German vocabulary as at least borrow words? I suspect we see a more distinct German, Italian and Irish identity that does not simply merge into "white", and how might that, combined with a European but not WASP sub-culture impact Civil Rights? I do not believe German would be as frequently used, strongly learned or as surviving as Spanish proves to be, but I would predict it lingers quite obviously in the German community cities, offering a strong Germanic culture carve out sort of how Chinatown in a city offers part tourist trap, part cultural touch point and part language preserve. Even such a small Germantown remnant might have rather curious affect upon American culture, language and politics.
 
The only part of the continental United States that is ancestrally Spanish speaking (as opposed to recent immigrants) is the Rio Grande Valley. And that's because >90% of the population there was historically Spanish speaking so there was incentive to continue. No German speaking area was as large or as dense as that. WWI may have had an impact but it probably just accelerated an existing trend of assimilation among white ethnic groups. Just look at Cajun Country, and how much French has declined there.
That is not quite true. Spanish was also "ancestrally speaking," present in all parts of Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, and California ever since the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the Mexican Cession of those territories after the Mexican War between the United States and Mexico. So the presence in parts of the population speaking Spanish combined with the immigration to much of this area has been non-stop since 1848. Yes immigration may help to keep it alive, but the combination of the two has resulted in it not going away as compared to German.
 
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