14 DAY TRIAL // Recent data, collected by researchers from old court transcripts, newspapers and other testimonies, show that the wave of German immigrants who reached Wisconsin from 1850 to the 1930s not only didn't learn English as soon as they arrived, but flourished to the second and third generation speaking only German.
By the middle of the 20th century, many communities in the Wisconsin area flourished in commerce and trade, without the people behind these achievements speaking a single English word. This blatantly contradicts the widespread current belief, which argues that all newcomers in America had to learn the language as soon as they arrived, otherwise they wouldn't have fitted in. UW-Madison German Ph.D. graduate Miranda Wilkerson uncovered concrete evidence to the contrary, by digging through old archives and recordings.
In some areas, as much as one fifth of the population spoke only German in the early years of the 20th century. The unusual thing about these statistics was not the large number of people not speaking English, but the fact that very few of those who spoke German were part of the first wave of immigrants to the States. In fact, most of them were already second or third generations, born and raised in the United States.
As further proof that immigrants didn't learn English as fast as they were believed to, Wilkerson showed that, over the years, more than 500 German-only newspapers were published in Wisconsin alone. In 1932, a publication stated "English was not even necessary for their day-to-day interactions. Every person they came in contact with could speak German at least as well as English. In Ozaukee County, there is evidence that the Irish families who lived scattered among the Germans could speak German."
It would now seem that the rumors were unfounded; although not entirely, someone might argue. Most immigrants who came from significantly diverse backgrounds were forced to learn the language because they would have otherwise had no means of survival. Whereas the German population came in large waves and they were dependent on each other for survival. Understanding the social factors behind the migration could help linguists better understand the dynamics of learning the English language in people who came to the U.S. 150 years ago.