[_emacsomancer_]

The US culture/society also tends to kill off non-English languages. Spanish is large enough and with a 'renewable' resource of Spanish speakers from other parts of the Americas that it manages to survive, but other languages do not fare as well.

[schoen]

I don't think that's quite right. Chinese is a notable counterexample in a lot of places, as well as Vietnamese and Tagalog and some others. But Spanish definitely has a more universal geographic distribution in the U.S. than any other non-English language.

This article and map were pretty interesting:

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2014/05/langua...

[_emacsomancer_]

There's enough immigration that other languages can get 'renewed' too, but the general pattern is for languages to die off by the second generation. This is in stark contrast to what happens, say, in India where speakers maintain ancestral languages much better even when they have been resident in area which employs a different language for many generations. It seems to come down to cultural handling of mono- vs multi-lingualism.