I wrote recently about a couple of elevator incidents. In this one, I describe the strange Asian language that a family was speaking. (I can usually distinguish between the Chinese Mandarin and Cantonese and recognize when it is neither, and Vietnamese, since I spent some years teaching English as a Second Language at a Chinese immigration center.) The family is clearly new to the country, since even the children were speaking the language to each other. And children pick up English relatively quickly, school requirements and all.
But these children will most likely retain their strange accent. We can no longer go back to those charming quirks where Robert De Niro's "You talkin' to me?" can only sound effective in his Italianized American English. These accents are more alien, more persistent, and more widespread. I've already noticed that Chinese who look from a distance like they are "assimilated" Chinese Canadians speak a strange accented English with what I presume are Chinese grammatical influences, such as dropping the "s" at the end of plural words, or when speaking in the third person, as in "he speak."
This is deeper than an accent. It is a re-writing of the English language and creating a new idiom. Something like the pidgin English spoken by Caribbeans, which an Englishman would be hard pressed to understand.
Yet another colorful addition to our multi-culti smörgåsbord, which will quietly and efficiently do away with the beautiful English language.