Arrive before age nine and your English may match a native speaker's
Children who moved to the United States from non-English-speaking countries at nine or younger ended up speaking English about as well as those from English-speaking lands. Arrive later, and proficiency drops steadily with every year of age. That finding sits at the heart of how minorities absorb, resist or reshape a dominant culture.
Assimilation describes a minority group coming to resemble the majority, sometimes to the point of taking on its values, habits and beliefs wholesale. The melting pot idea rests on it. Its opposite is multiculturalism, the cultural mosaic, in which several traditions live side by side. Integration sits in between: joining a society economically and socially while keeping parts of an inherited culture. Acculturation differs again, because both groups change while staying distinct.
The process comes in several flavours. Full assimilation, when newcomers can no longer be told apart from the dominant group, often happens without anyone planning it. Additive assimilation lets people widen their cultural toolkit instead of discarding their ancestry. Assimilationism, by contrast, is a government policy of deliberately folding ethnic groups into a national culture, whether they agree or not.
Forced versions have a poor track record. Colonial powers imposed them on Indigenous peoples, and such campaigns often proved unsustainable, provoking revolts and collapsing once control slipped; suppressed communities frequently returned to their own religions and customs. Outward conformity can also mask private loyalty. During the Spanish Inquisition, many Jews and Muslims accepted Catholicism in public while quietly keeping their old faiths at home.
For immigrants, social scientists track four yardsticks: income and status, where people live, second-language skill and marriage across groups. The Bleakley and Chin study of 2010 behind the age-nine finding also linked better English to later marriage, higher divorce rates, fewer children and spouses nearer in age, and estimated that speaking English well lifts income by more than a third. A 2014 study by Verkuyten found that immigrant children who integrate or assimilate are received more warmly by classmates than those who stay separate or are pushed to the margins.
Source: Cultural assimilation
