Introduction

According to the 2007 American Community Survey conducted by the US Census Bureau, Chinese is the second most common non-English language in the USA (Table 1.1). Chinese is also the most commonly spoken language in the world, spoken by approximately one fifth of the world's population, including the 1.3 billion people living in China. Also indicated in the Census was a 75 percent increase in the US Chinese-origin population, from 1,645,472 in 1990 to 2,879,636 in 2000 (forming 1.02 percent of the US population). The data also suggest that, rather than forming a totally assimilated group, the Chinese population is a relatively new immigrant group, in that 70.8 percent of them were foreign-born, with or without a naturalized citizenship, as compared with 10.1 percent of the overall total foreign-born population in the USA. Moreover, out of the Chinese foreign-born, 75.6 percent arrived after 1980, which indicates that the majority of the Chinese population in the USA is comprised of individuals who arrived as adults or between the ages of 6 and 18 who have fully or partially acquired Chinese as a first language.

Studies on East Asian languages show that, like the other minority languages in the USA, there is a fast and prevalent generational language shift among recent Asian immigrants and their descendants in the USA (Kondo-Brown 2006). Research on Chinese as a heritage language also reveals increasing attrition (Xiao 2008a).