Take a walk down the streets of any large city in the USA – and increasingly many mid-sized cities and small towns – and you can usually hear more than one language spoken by local residents. Some may think that this linguistic diversity is due entirely to recent immigration. However, as this book seeks to demonstrate, the USA has always been linguistically diverse. And while a large part of our diversity is thanks to immigration, some of it is due to other factors such as land purchases and annexations. In addition, a large portion of today's speakers of Languages Other Than English (often referred to as “LOTEs”) in the USA were born and raised in the USA. These are the children and grandchildren of immigrants – they themselves are not immigrants.

Yet it is undeniable that immigration is driving and sustaining our nation's proficiency in many LOTEs today. There are several excellent books about immigrants in the USA, most notably Portes and Rumbaut's (2006) fascinating account of immigrant experiences and the significant roles played by social class, residential patterns, and available networks. These authors note that language is a fundamental dimension of the process of acculturation, and that in the minds of many, the “litmus test of Americanization” is learning English and losing the mother tongue.