Economist, Mar 31, 2018 (I)

choi

(1) Spanish in America | The Long Adiós; Can Spanish avoid America’s language graveyard?
https://www.economist.com/news/u ... -language-graveyard

Note:
(a) "IN A sunny classroom scattered with Spanish translations of 'Green Eggs and Ham' [a 1960 children's book by Dr Seuss] and Spanish-English dictionaries, Anabel Barrón reads aloud to her second-grade class from a book about penguins. 'Y [=and] los pingüinos vuelan?' she asked. 'No, they don’t fly!' answered an eager boy with a neat crew cut. 'En español, por favor, Justin,' Ms Barrón gently chided him.  The classroom is one of several that offers bilingual instruction at the Sandra Cisneros Campus, a charter school in the Echo Park neighbourhood of Los Angeles that serves mostly Latino children. * * * Melissa Mendoza, the school’s principal, Latino parents are seeking out dual-immersion programmes for a different reason: to make sure their English-dominant children can speak Spanish at all.  Such was the motive for Juan Montanez, whose five-year-old son, Rocco, attends kindergarten at Sandra Cisneros."
(i)
(A) Spanish-English dictionary:
* pingüino (noun masculine): "penguin"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pingüino
* vuelan: "third-person plural present indicative form of [verb] volar [to fly]"   (Third-person singular present indicative form of volar is vuelo.)
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vuelan
(B) The pronunciation of Spanish. Oxforddictionaries.com, undated
https://es.oxforddictionaries.com/grammar/spanish-pronunciation
("Note that the u is not pronounced in the combinations gue and gui [as in noun masculine guiso stew], unless it is written with a diaeresis," as in pingüino, where gü is pronouounced like "gw" in English)
(C) diaeresis (n): "compare UMLAUT"
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/diaeresis

* The German Surname Müller, from German noun masculine Müller
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Müller

, where the umlaut ü changes the u pronunciation to something the same as the vowel in 雨/魚.
(ii) Sandra Cisneros
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandra_Cisneros
(born in Chicago in 1954 as Mexican American; a writer now lives in Mexico; never married)
(iii) name origin of Echo Park:
"City parks superintendent Joseph Henry Tomlinson chose the name because of echoes he heard during the construction of Echo Park Lake in 1892." from the Web.  No others heard of it then and afterwards, so Tomlinson is said to be "imaginative."
(iv) Mendoza (name)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendoza_(name)  
(a Basque surname)
(v) The Spanish surname Montanez is composed of noun masculine monte mountain + suffix =ez offspring (as in Rodriguez).

(b) "Linguists have often referred to America as a 'language graveyard.' Despite being a country of immigrants, it has tended to snuff out foreign languages within two or three generations. * * * Given the large size and rapid growth of the Hispanic population, some people used to fear that Spanish would not only endure but overtake English * * * That concern has turned out to be unfounded."

(c) "Between 2006 and 2015 the population that speaks Spanish at home in America, which is often interpreted as a proxy for Spanish dominance, grew from 31m to 37m. But during the same period the share of all Spanish-speaking Hispanics who speak Spanish at home shrank by five percentage points, from 78% to 73%. Data analysed by Pew Research Centre, a think-tank, show that, in 2000, 48% of Latino adults aged 50 to 68 and 73% of Latino children aged 5 to 17 spoke 'only English' or 'English very well.' By 2014 those figures had increased to 52% and 88%.  The explanation has a lot to do with changing demography. Net migration to America from Mexico, the largest source of immigrants, has been negative since the end of the financial crisis. More Hispanics in America today were born in the United States than arrived from other countries as immigrants, making them less likely to speak Spanish at home—or at all. In 2000, 59.9% of Latinos were born in America. By 2015 that share jumped to 65.6%. Lower birth rates and a stronger economy in Mexico mean such trends are likely to continue, rendering the future of Spanish in the United States uncertain.  In his well-known study on 'linguistic life expectancies' in southern California in 2006, Rubén Rumbaut, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, found that Spanish was following the same trajectory as other languages in America had—just more slowly. He established that only 5% of fourth-generation Mexican-Americans in southern California could speak Spanish very well"
(i) The data between the first sentence and the second can be easily explained by population growth in US including, that of Hispanics.  The third sentence indicates that the population growth of Hispanics in US comes from births of American Hispanics, rather than immigration of Mexicans to US. That explains the second sentence.
(ii) Reuben
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reuben

(d) "Nationwide, 21.5% of American pupils were learning another language, compared with more than half of pupils in Europe. Research shows that 75.5% of English-speaking Americans who are fluent in another language learned that language at home; only 16.3% did so at school. As Spanish use at home shrinks among Latino families, the language seems destined to dwindle too."