1. High educational level of immigrant group.
   • Plus: maintain lively intellectual life, establish schools, theater, colleges, quality language maintenance.
   • Minus: interact more with Anglo-Americans, assimilate faster, e.g. Scandinavians, German

2. Low educational level
   • Plus: strong group cohesion, aloofness, preserve traditions, perpetuate "little" traditions.
   • Minus: difficulty in establishing quality education, institutions, can't compete with quality Anglo-Am; 2nd generation rejects parents' `inferior' culture and mother-tongue: e.g. Italo-Americans.

3. Great numerical strength:
   • Plus: establishing many educational institutions, have $$ to afford for minority press, political power at state/local level, diminishes intermarriage.
   • Minus: multiplies contact with E majority, increases likelihood of factionalism, lack of cohesiveness. apprehension and animosity from Majority, e.g. Germans. Larger chance for differential scale of education, lack of perceived need for solidarity; increases complacency about need for quality maintenance.

4. Smallness of group.
   • Plus: leaders can control more easily; all members are known to leadership and everyone else.
   • Minus: Staffpower, money are in short supply; maintenance of press, schools, etc. is difficult. Leads to feelings of hopelessness for future of language.

5. Cultural and/or linguistic similarity to (Anglo) Majority.
   • Plus: Conducive to tolerance and acceptance from majority; minority members have high self-esteem, high esteem for their language
   • Minus: Leads to erosion of group consciousness and differences by the 2nd, 3rd generations.

6. Great cultural and/or linguistic dissimilarity between minority and majority.
   • Plus: Awareness enhances consciousness, where dissimilarity may lead to animosity, prejudice, segregation; language maintenance may be stronger. (e.g. Japanese- Americans in WWII internment camps.)
   • Minus: Dissimilarity leads to greater attempts by 2nd, 3rd generations to assimilate; language is lost.

7. Suppression of Minority Language.
   • Plus: Official suppression often leads to strengthened resistance: Poland under Czarist Russia; Germans in WWII occupation; Tamil in Sri Lanka; Kurds in Iraq, Iran.
   • Minus: Suppression by majority may lead to collapse: German in US in 1917-23.

8. Acceptance, permissiveness by majority.
   • Plus: Encourages institutions to flourish: early west-European languages in US
   • Minus: Lack of obstacles lulls group into false sense of security: more recent immigrant groups (east, southern Europe).

9. Socio-cultural characteristics of minority group in question:

   Difficult to define, but means there may be particular reasons that affect one group or another, one way or another:

   • Finnish Sisu?;
   • Greeks' `homesickness'?
   • Chinese ethno-centrism?
   • Orthographic problems? (Non-western writing systems make it difficult for children; Latin alphabet would facilitate some retention;)
   • diglossia may complicate matters, etc.

   Is this what I call linguistic culture?

Summary: no one factor can be singled out as the factor in successful or unsuccessful language maintenance; usually a complex of factors.