Something I've generally been curious about is besides in deliberately isolated communities such as the Amish what sort of ethnic groups speak their native language at home in the second generation or even after?
Remember most of these people who still speak German (and are not Amish) was born before mass media as we know it.
So immigrants who settled in rural areas and took up farming, alsooften settled relative close to other immigrants and rarely had anything to do English speakers, except when they visited towns (sometimes at least some groups like the Germans often also dominated the local towns). So they did not need English.
In fact without the World Wars, especially German would likely have been much wider spoken, as it was only with the hostility against the non-English (again especially Germans) that they begun to assimilate into a English speaker identity, and in fact some of the prarie states only forced teaching in English through with WW2, this was the start of the disappearance of the ethnic enclaves in the area, without that, you could easily see the prarie states still being dominated by German, Slavic and Scandinavian enclaves.
