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1. Spanish will not become an official language of the United States ever because the United States does not have an official language. English is the de facto, but there's no legislation about it. There would be an uproar if the US adopted English as an official language.
2. The US is already way more linguistically diverse than Canada. Canada's French-speaking population is more prevalent and has more political pull than the Spanish-speaking population in the US, but that's only a small portion of linguistic demographics. The population of the US is spread over a much bigger area than that of Canada, even though Canada is larger in area, and the linguistic character of Huntsville, Alabama is nothing like the linguistic character of Fargo, North Dakota. The variety of dialects and accents (and of course world languages) is bigger in the US than in Canada, therefore, more linguistically diverse.
Hopefully everyone already knows this, but the United States has NO official language.
It doesn't but English is the de facto language and most states have English as the official language. And quite frankly, if Spanish ever did become the official language, I would either move out of the country or just continue speaking English.
I wish I could find the origin of this quote, but it's pretty true: "America is where languages go to die." As a general rule, by the third generation, the native tongue is lost. It's possible that the large numbers of people from one linguistic group (Spanish) will preserve the tongue a bit longer similar to how California Chinese tended to still keep the Chinese language through the third generation due to cultural isolation. But even in that case, Chinese tended to be lost by the next generation (most Chinese-speaking children in the country today are children of immigrants from the post-'65 system). In short, I'd be pretty shocked if English ever came close to falling behind Spanish.
It's not that I think English is a better language (Italian is the best language, btw), but rather the U.S. has a strong homogenizing influence and you can't really succeed in America without English.
Canada has english and french. And the United States has english and spanish. And people are always like "oh spanish speakers will assimilate". Will the United States be bilingual always?
Data Center Language Snapshot
We have 8 million spanish speakers under 18 in 2010, and 247,366. So can this population of spanish speakers sustain itself without immigration?
"Thus, while a high degree of uncertainty still prevails concerning the size of flows that may be observed in the near term," the authors write, "the main conclusion we draw from our analysis is that net migration flows of Mexicans to the United States over the coming years are likely to increase as compared to what was observed during the recent global crisis, but that such flows are very unlikely to reach the levels registered in the 1990s."
So what do you think? Will spanish stick around? I always feel jealous that Canada has a second language, but the Usa doesn't.
Spanish is already very prevalent and is fairly well represented in the media and on the internet in the US however, it will never be like Canada. The authoritarian regime of the Quebec governments and it's French only mandates would never be tolerated in the US by the people in regards to a Spanish only.
I do disagree with the people that think that English could never be made the official language of the country, I think they are overlooking how fearful some people could be, if perhaps the major networks or major publications started publishing major stories or broadcasting in prime-time in Spanish rather than English. You'd find quite a few people who would be up in arms and organizing campaigns pretty quickly to quash it and mandate English only.
The question in the title is not the same as the question in the poll OP.
No, the US will never be as linguistically diverse as Canada, because Canadians tolerate linguistic diversity. When they hear two speakers conversing in their mother tongue in the supermarket, they do not take it a personal attack by people who are trying to infuriate them by throwing foreign languages in their face, and they do not regard all those "jabbering foreigners" as a justification for the Second Amendment.
As for the other question, no, Spanish speaking Americans are diligently trying to learn English as fast as they can. Here in South Texas, if an Anglo speaks to a Hispanic in Spanish, the Hispanic will prefer to reply in the best English he can. A Hispanic shopkeeper or cashier will always address a Hispanic customer in English first, and switch to Spanish only if it becomes apparent that the customers still has difficulty with Spanish. Most clerks and cashiers cannot speak any Spanish at all, even quite a lot of them who are of Hispanic ancestry of third of fourth generation.
And the other reason is because America is populated by a very large number of haters (maybe a majority nowadays), who will never learn a single word of another language, just out of spite.
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