'Anglo-conformity','cultural pluralism','the third generation interest','behavioural assimilation'and'structural assimilation'. This essay attempts to take another look at ethnic identification and ethnic continuity in the United States in the hope that this meagre arsenal of commonly accepted formulations can be enriched. Its vantage point will be a recently completed study oi language maintenance among immigrant groups in which several topics in the sociology of language were explored at the nationwide, community and family levels of analysis.'

Basic to this essay is the view that the erosion of ethnicity and ethnic identity experienced by most (but not all) American ethnic groups takes place in the course of three generations; it involves, in other words, the immigrant fathers, their sons and their grandsons. Contrary to the widely prevalent opinion that there ensues some kind of a return to the fold of ethnicity, whenever any immigrant group reaches the third generation stage of its development',^ we hold that the ethnic heritage, including the ethnic mother tongue, usually ceases to play any viable role in the life of the third generation. Hansen's claim to the effect that'Anyone who has the courage to codify the laws of history must include what can be designated as the principle of the third generation interest','stems largely from a misreading of the contrastive pattem involved. For he seemed to have come upon the idea of the'returning grandsons' agamst the background of the'ffeeing sons'. To cite him again:'The theory is derived from the almost universal phenomenon that what the son wishes to forget the grandson wishes to remember. This tendency might be illustrated by a hundred examples.'* The resurgent interest of the grandsons in ethnicity is thus relative to the determination of