Most Santa Clara County residents soon will speak a language other than English at home
By Mike Swift
MEDIANEWS STAFF
Inside a San Jose industrial shop, Mason Lin stands amid the tart smell of natural gas, holding a glass tube over a hissing blue flame. Lin waits until the tube glows orange before twisting it into the serpentine swirls and bows of a Mandarin character.
Within three hours, a colorful neon sign that will blaze the name of a Chinese-owned business into the night emerges between Lin's patient fingers.
The words "Now Hiring" appear over the door of Allen Signs, the sign-making company owned by Mason Lin's brother Allen. When Allen Lin arrived in San Jose from Taiwan in 1981, there was enough work to support one man making Chinese signs, no more. Mason joined him in 1986, and Allen Signs is now a seven-person shop, with Lin looking for a few more workers.
"Ever since 1990, I can see it, it's steady -- irregardless of the economy, our growth is very steady," said Allen Lin, who makes signs in both Chinese and English -- frequently in both -- for everything from yogurt shops and American fast-food franchises to flooring companies. "In 1981, I'm the only one doing that."
As it grows as a global technology hub, Silicon Valley has become one of the most polyglot places in the United States. Santa Clara County is on the brink of a linguistic milestone: Within the next few years, more people will speak a foreign language at home than the number who speak English, recently released census data shows. Given the statistical uncertainty, that threshold may already have been crossed.
Santa Clara County has the largest population of Hindi speakers among all counties in the United States, the second largest population of Vietnamese speakers, the third largest population of Persian/Farsi speakers, and the fifth biggest number of Chinese speakers, a MediaNews analysis of 2005 census data shows.
Since 2000, Santa Clara County has passed Los Angeles and San Francisco to become the California county with the highest percentage of immigrants, with 36 percent of its population born outside of the United States. Miami is the only metropolitan region in the United States with a higher percentage of immigrants than the San Jose area.
There are about a dozen large counties in the United States -- including Los Angeles, Miami-Dade and the New York City boroughs of Queens and the Bronx -- where English-speakers are in the minority. But perhaps only urban Queens has the global shuffle of suburban Santa Clara County, with its multiple South and East Asian languages and sizable Spanish-speaking population.
Joint Venture: Silicon Valley, which has a new 2007 Index report, calls the linguistic mix an economic advantage, allowing collaboration with emerging "spikes" of high-tech innovation and venture capital investment in regions like Bangalore, India; Shanghai, China; and Helsinki, Finland.
"If you think about Miami or L.A., those are places that are characterized in some sense by ethnic tension, and that's not the case in Silicon Valley," said Russell Hancock, president and CEO of Joint Venture: Silicon Valley.
Perhaps, but language was at the heart of two recent community battles in Silicon Valley -- Palo Alto's debate over a Mandarin language immersion program in its public schools, and the city of Santa Clara's dust-up over a proposal to designate a stretch of El Camino Real as a Koreatown, with a Korean-language police officer and requirements that Korean-American merchants post signs in English as well as Korean.
Both ideas met with an emotional backlash from residents. Koreatown opponents, who said the plan could splinter Santa Clara along ethnic lines, gathered more than 1,000 petition signatures under the banner "Santa Clara Unity" to oppose the idea, which the city killed in January.
Santa Clara resident Ron Johnstone said Koreatown was an example of something that erodes the nation's common identity.
When Johnstone's father arrived in New York wearing a hat as an immigrant from England in the 1930s, he looked down from his ship and "he didn't see a single person wearing a hat. He had decided he was going to be an American, so he took the hat and he threw it overboard. That was an example of a man who wanted to become an American," Johnstone said. Proposals such as Koreatown aren't "doing us a bit of good. We don't try to get people to fit in, it would be much better for them if we did."
In San Jose, City Council member Madison Nguyen wants to designate a Vietnamtown but said she doesn't want segregation.
"We're not just focusing on our community, we're integrating into this country," Nguyen said of San Jose's Vietnamese. "I think in a way it's nice to have that sort of (Vietnamtown) designation, but at the same time, it's nice to sort of blend in, blend in with the city and know there is a large group of Vietnamese-Americans, of Filipino-Americans or Indo-Americans here but at the same time integrating into the city."
By some measures of race and ethnicity, Los Angeles, Miami or New York City all have more diversity than Silicon Valley.
"They don't have a sizeable black population. They don't have the Latino population" of Los Angeles or Miami, said Albert Camarillo, a Stanford history professor who studies immigrant and Latino issues. In Los Angeles and parts of New York City, a majority of residents speak languages other than English at home.
What is remarkable about Santa Clara County is the number of languages spoken by a sizeable number of people -- from Asian languages such as Tagalog, Korean and Gujarathi, to European languages such as German, Russian and Portuguese. The San Jose Unified School District teaches English to a student population that speaks about 40 languages at home, from Arabic to Tigrinya, a language spoken by an ethnic group that originates in Eritrea and parts of neighboring Ethiopia in eastern Africa.
Although Asian languages are growing more quickly, Spanish remains the most common foreign language in Santa Clara County, spoken by about 18 percent of the population, up from about 14 percent in 1990. Mandarin and other dialects of Chinese are next, spoken by about 8 percent of the population -- double its share in 1990. Vietnamese and Tagalog come next.
Silicon Valley is also essentially suburban in character, unlike the dense and tribal urban neighborhoods of the Northeast that were the beachheads of an earlier generation of immigrants and remain so in places such as Queens.
Silicon Valley immigrants also are more likely to be bilingual. In Los Angeles, San Francisco and Queens, 40 percent or less of Chinese-speakers speak English "very well," 2005 census numbers show. In Santa Clara County, about 50 percent of Chinese-speakers speak English very well. According to the Joint Venture: Silicon Valley report's analysis of census data, 80 percent of the region's immigrants speak English "well" or "very well."
San Jose has the best-educated suburbs in the United States in terms of people with a four-year college degree, according to an analysis by Brookings Institution demographer Bill Frey, and it is the leading edge of a transformation that increasingly makes it tougher for politicians seeking national office to capture "the suburban vote" with a single strategy.
"Back in the 1950s, the suburbs were distinct in terms of their demographics," Frey said. "You could say you were from the suburbs and people would conjure up that you were white, middle class, had a family and lived in a single-family house. Now it's almost the reverse ... you talk about the suburbs and that's a microcosm of America."
About 55 percent of Silicon Valley's science and engineering talent was born abroad, the Joint Venture report says, with 40 percent of the region's total work force foreign-born.
The Babelian stew of languages is so ingrained to the economic life of Silicon Valley that the view from Hilda Balakhane's storefront is hardly remarkable anymore.
Balakhane and her husband, Albert Sedighpour, own Fantasy Collection, a store in a nondescript strip mall on Union Avenue that sells unique gifts -- Persian CDs, videos, crossword puzzles, books, evil eyes and other charms, and a vast array of pots to cook Persian rice dishes. The store is stacked high with the ceremonial objects crucial to any Persian wedding. People come from as far as Sacramento and Monterey to rent or buy, but also just to hear their own language spoken.
Fantasy Collection "is like the home to a lot of homesicks who come here," Balakhane said in her store one recent afternoon.
Looking out toward Union Avenue, Balakhane has a view of an Indian-owned liquor store, a Palestinian-owned food market, a Vietnamese-owned nail salon, a Mexican taqueria, a Brazilian self-defense school and Ed's Gourmet, a restaurant owned by Korean-born Eddie Ha.
On any afternoon, a visitor to the plaza might hear Arabic, Vietnamese, Hindi, Farsi, Spanish, Hebrew, Mandarin -- and always English. Ha says 90 percent of his customers are white. Even with the growth in non-English-speaking households in Silicon Valley, census data says the number of bilingual Asian and European-language households has grown more since 2000.
Allen Lin says when Chinese merchants ask him to make a sign in Mandarin, he urges them to use English whenever possible.
"I tell them this is still America," Lin said. Often it's not possible to fit both languages on a sign because zoning regulations limit the size, forcing businesses to choose. About 60 percent of Lin's business is Mandarin, but Lin said the split is slowly shifting toward English.
"The higher educated Asian people," he said, "they don't need to rely on the Chinese language to communicate anymore."
By Mike Swift
MEDIANEWS STAFF
Inside a San Jose industrial shop, Mason Lin stands amid the tart smell of natural gas, holding a glass tube over a hissing blue flame. Lin waits until the tube glows orange before twisting it into the serpentine swirls and bows of a Mandarin character.
Within three hours, a colorful neon sign that will blaze the name of a Chinese-owned business into the night emerges between Lin's patient fingers.
The words "Now Hiring" appear over the door of Allen Signs, the sign-making company owned by Mason Lin's brother Allen. When Allen Lin arrived in San Jose from Taiwan in 1981, there was enough work to support one man making Chinese signs, no more. Mason joined him in 1986, and Allen Signs is now a seven-person shop, with Lin looking for a few more workers.
"Ever since 1990, I can see it, it's steady -- irregardless of the economy, our growth is very steady," said Allen Lin, who makes signs in both Chinese and English -- frequently in both -- for everything from yogurt shops and American fast-food franchises to flooring companies. "In 1981, I'm the only one doing that."
As it grows as a global technology hub, Silicon Valley has become one of the most polyglot places in the United States. Santa Clara County is on the brink of a linguistic milestone: Within the next few years, more people will speak a foreign language at home than the number who speak English, recently released census data shows. Given the statistical uncertainty, that threshold may already have been crossed.
Santa Clara County has the largest population of Hindi speakers among all counties in the United States, the second largest population of Vietnamese speakers, the third largest population of Persian/Farsi speakers, and the fifth biggest number of Chinese speakers, a MediaNews analysis of 2005 census data shows.
Since 2000, Santa Clara County has passed Los Angeles and San Francisco to become the California county with the highest percentage of immigrants, with 36 percent of its population born outside of the United States. Miami is the only metropolitan region in the United States with a higher percentage of immigrants than the San Jose area.
There are about a dozen large counties in the United States -- including Los Angeles, Miami-Dade and the New York City boroughs of Queens and the Bronx -- where English-speakers are in the minority. But perhaps only urban Queens has the global shuffle of suburban Santa Clara County, with its multiple South and East Asian languages and sizable Spanish-speaking population.
Joint Venture: Silicon Valley, which has a new 2007 Index report, calls the linguistic mix an economic advantage, allowing collaboration with emerging "spikes" of high-tech innovation and venture capital investment in regions like Bangalore, India; Shanghai, China; and Helsinki, Finland.
"If you think about Miami or L.A., those are places that are characterized in some sense by ethnic tension, and that's not the case in Silicon Valley," said Russell Hancock, president and CEO of Joint Venture: Silicon Valley.
Perhaps, but language was at the heart of two recent community battles in Silicon Valley -- Palo Alto's debate over a Mandarin language immersion program in its public schools, and the city of Santa Clara's dust-up over a proposal to designate a stretch of El Camino Real as a Koreatown, with a Korean-language police officer and requirements that Korean-American merchants post signs in English as well as Korean.
Both ideas met with an emotional backlash from residents. Koreatown opponents, who said the plan could splinter Santa Clara along ethnic lines, gathered more than 1,000 petition signatures under the banner "Santa Clara Unity" to oppose the idea, which the city killed in January.
Santa Clara resident Ron Johnstone said Koreatown was an example of something that erodes the nation's common identity.
When Johnstone's father arrived in New York wearing a hat as an immigrant from England in the 1930s, he looked down from his ship and "he didn't see a single person wearing a hat. He had decided he was going to be an American, so he took the hat and he threw it overboard. That was an example of a man who wanted to become an American," Johnstone said. Proposals such as Koreatown aren't "doing us a bit of good. We don't try to get people to fit in, it would be much better for them if we did."
In San Jose, City Council member Madison Nguyen wants to designate a Vietnamtown but said she doesn't want segregation.
"We're not just focusing on our community, we're integrating into this country," Nguyen said of San Jose's Vietnamese. "I think in a way it's nice to have that sort of (Vietnamtown) designation, but at the same time, it's nice to sort of blend in, blend in with the city and know there is a large group of Vietnamese-Americans, of Filipino-Americans or Indo-Americans here but at the same time integrating into the city."
By some measures of race and ethnicity, Los Angeles, Miami or New York City all have more diversity than Silicon Valley.
"They don't have a sizeable black population. They don't have the Latino population" of Los Angeles or Miami, said Albert Camarillo, a Stanford history professor who studies immigrant and Latino issues. In Los Angeles and parts of New York City, a majority of residents speak languages other than English at home.
What is remarkable about Santa Clara County is the number of languages spoken by a sizeable number of people -- from Asian languages such as Tagalog, Korean and Gujarathi, to European languages such as German, Russian and Portuguese. The San Jose Unified School District teaches English to a student population that speaks about 40 languages at home, from Arabic to Tigrinya, a language spoken by an ethnic group that originates in Eritrea and parts of neighboring Ethiopia in eastern Africa.
Although Asian languages are growing more quickly, Spanish remains the most common foreign language in Santa Clara County, spoken by about 18 percent of the population, up from about 14 percent in 1990. Mandarin and other dialects of Chinese are next, spoken by about 8 percent of the population -- double its share in 1990. Vietnamese and Tagalog come next.
Silicon Valley is also essentially suburban in character, unlike the dense and tribal urban neighborhoods of the Northeast that were the beachheads of an earlier generation of immigrants and remain so in places such as Queens.
Silicon Valley immigrants also are more likely to be bilingual. In Los Angeles, San Francisco and Queens, 40 percent or less of Chinese-speakers speak English "very well," 2005 census numbers show. In Santa Clara County, about 50 percent of Chinese-speakers speak English very well. According to the Joint Venture: Silicon Valley report's analysis of census data, 80 percent of the region's immigrants speak English "well" or "very well."
San Jose has the best-educated suburbs in the United States in terms of people with a four-year college degree, according to an analysis by Brookings Institution demographer Bill Frey, and it is the leading edge of a transformation that increasingly makes it tougher for politicians seeking national office to capture "the suburban vote" with a single strategy.
"Back in the 1950s, the suburbs were distinct in terms of their demographics," Frey said. "You could say you were from the suburbs and people would conjure up that you were white, middle class, had a family and lived in a single-family house. Now it's almost the reverse ... you talk about the suburbs and that's a microcosm of America."
About 55 percent of Silicon Valley's science and engineering talent was born abroad, the Joint Venture report says, with 40 percent of the region's total work force foreign-born.
The Babelian stew of languages is so ingrained to the economic life of Silicon Valley that the view from Hilda Balakhane's storefront is hardly remarkable anymore.
Balakhane and her husband, Albert Sedighpour, own Fantasy Collection, a store in a nondescript strip mall on Union Avenue that sells unique gifts -- Persian CDs, videos, crossword puzzles, books, evil eyes and other charms, and a vast array of pots to cook Persian rice dishes. The store is stacked high with the ceremonial objects crucial to any Persian wedding. People come from as far as Sacramento and Monterey to rent or buy, but also just to hear their own language spoken.
Fantasy Collection "is like the home to a lot of homesicks who come here," Balakhane said in her store one recent afternoon.
Looking out toward Union Avenue, Balakhane has a view of an Indian-owned liquor store, a Palestinian-owned food market, a Vietnamese-owned nail salon, a Mexican taqueria, a Brazilian self-defense school and Ed's Gourmet, a restaurant owned by Korean-born Eddie Ha.
On any afternoon, a visitor to the plaza might hear Arabic, Vietnamese, Hindi, Farsi, Spanish, Hebrew, Mandarin -- and always English. Ha says 90 percent of his customers are white. Even with the growth in non-English-speaking households in Silicon Valley, census data says the number of bilingual Asian and European-language households has grown more since 2000.
Allen Lin says when Chinese merchants ask him to make a sign in Mandarin, he urges them to use English whenever possible.
"I tell them this is still America," Lin said. Often it's not possible to fit both languages on a sign because zoning regulations limit the size, forcing businesses to choose. About 60 percent of Lin's business is Mandarin, but Lin said the split is slowly shifting toward English.
"The higher educated Asian people," he said, "they don't need to rely on the Chinese language to communicate anymore."