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Language Use and English-Speaking Ability: 2000 Issued October 2003 Census 2000 Brief C2KBR-29 The ability to commu- By Hyon B. Shin nicate with govern- Figure 1. Reproduction of the Questions on with ment and private serv- Rosalind Bruno Language From Census 2000 ice providers, schools, businesses, emergency personnel, and many 11 a. Does this person speak a language other than English at home? other people in the United States depends Yes greatly on the ability to No Skip to 12 1 speak English. In b. What is this language? Census 2000, as in the two previous censuses, the U.S. Census Bureau (For example: Korean, Italian, Spanish, Vietnamese) asked people aged 5 and over if they spoke c. How well does this person speak English? a language other than Very well English at home. Well Among the 262.4 mil- Not well lion people aged 5 and Not at all over, 47.0 million (18 percent) spoke a Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Census 2000 questionnaire. language other than English at home. This report, part of a series that presents 2000. Various questions on language population and housing data collected in were asked in the censuses from 1890 to Census 2000, presents data on language 1970, including a question on “mother spoken at home and the ability to speak tongue” (the language spoken in the per- English of people aged 5 and over. It son’s home when he or she was a child). describes population distributions and The first language question in Census characteristics for the United States, 2000 asked respondents whether they including regions, states, counties, and spoke a language other than English at selected places with populations of home. Those who responded “Yes” to 100,000 or more. Question 11a were asked what language The questions illustrated in Figure 1 were they spoke. The write-in answers to asked in the census in 1980, 1990, and Question 11b (specific language spoken) were optically scanned and coded. Although linguists recognize several 1 The text of this report discusses data for the thousand languages in the world, the United States, including the 50 states and the District of Columbia. Data for the Commonwealth of coding operation used by the Census Puerto Rico are shown in Table 2 and Figure 5. Bureau put the reported languages into U.S. Department of Commerce U S C E N S U S B U R E A U Economics and Statistics Administration U.S. CENSUS BUREAU Helping You Make Informed Decisions about 380 categories of single lan- guages or language families.2 Figure 2. Speakers of Languages Other Than English at Home For people who answered “Yes” to and English Ability by Language Group: 2000 Question 11a, Question 11c asked (Population 5 years and over, in millions. Data based on sample. For respondents to indicate how well information on confidentiality protection, nonsampling error, sampling they spoke English. Respondents error, and definitions, see www.census.gov/prod/cen2000/doc/sf3.pdf) who said they spoke English “Very well” were considered to have no Spoke English "Very well" Spoke English less than "Very well" difficulty with English. Those who indicated they spoke English “Well,” “Not well,” or “Not at all” were con- Spanish 14.3 13.8 28.1 sidered to have difficulty with English — identified also as people Other Indo-European 6.6 3.4 10.0 languages who spoke English less than Asian and Pacific “Very well.” 3.4 3.6 7.0 Island languages The number and percentage All other 1.3 0.6 1.9 of people in the United States languages who spoke a language other than English at home increased Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Census 2000 Summary File 3. between 1990 and 2000. In 2000, 18 percent of the total Figure 3. population aged 5 and over, or Ten Languages Most Frequently Spoken at Home 47.0 million people, reported they Other Than English and Spanish: 2000 spoke a language other than (Population 5 years and over, in millions. Data based on sample. For English at home.3 These figures information on confidentiality protection, nonsampling error, sampling were up from 14 percent (31.8 mil- error, and definitions, see www.census.gov/prod/cen2000/doc/sf3.pdf) lion) in 1990 and 11 percent (23.1 million) in 1980. The number 2.0 of people who spoke a language Chinese other than English at home grew by French 1.6 38 percent in the 1980s and by 47 percent in the 1990s. While the German 1.4 population aged 5 and over grew by one-fourth from 1980 to 2000, Tagalog 1.2 the number who spoke a language other than English at home more Vietnamese1 1.0 than doubled. Italian1 1.0 In 2000, most people who spoke a language other than English at Korean 0.9 home reported they spoke English “Very well” (55 percent or Russian 0.7 2 More detailed information on languages Polish 0.7 and language coding can be found in “Summary File 3: 2000 Census of Population Arabic 0.6 and Housing Technical Documentation” issued December 2002 (www.census.gov/prod /cen2000/doc/sf3.pdf). 1 3 The estimates in this report are based on The number of Vietnamese speakers and the number of Italian speakers were not responses from a sample of the population. statistically different from one another. As with all surveys, estimates may vary from Note: The estimates in this figure vary from actual values due to sampling errors. As the actual values because of sampling varia- a result, the number of speakers of some languages shown in this figure may not be tion or other factors. All statements made in statistically different from the number of speakers of languages not shown in this figure. this report have undergone statistical testing Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Census 2000 Summary File 3. and are significant at the 90-percent confi- dence level unless otherwise noted. 2 U.S. Census Bureau Table 1).4 The number of Viet- Four Major Language Groups namese speakers doubled over the Spanish includes those who speak Ladino. decade, from about 507,000 speak- ers to just over 1 million speakers. Other Indo-European languages include most languages of Europe and the Indic languages of India. These include the Germanic Of the 20 non-English languages languages, such as German, Yiddish, and Dutch; the Scandinavian most frequently spoken at home languages, such as Swedish and Norwegian; the Romance languages, shown in Table 1, the largest pro- such as French, Italian, and Portuguese; the Slavic languages, such as portional increase was for Russian Russian, Polish, and Serbo-Croatian; the Indic languages, such as speakers, who nearly tripled from Hindi, Gujarathi, Punjabi, and Urdu; Celtic languages; Greek; Baltic 242,000 to 706,000. The second languages; and Iranian languages. largest increase was for French Creole speakers (the language Asian and Pacific Island languages include Chinese; Korean; group that includes Haitian Japanese; Vietnamese; Hmong; Khmer; Lao; Thai; Tagalog or Pilipino; Creoles), whose numbers more than the Dravidian languages of India, such as Telegu, Tamil, and doubled from 188,000 to 453,000. Malayalam; and other languages of Asia and the Pacific, including the Philippine, Polynesian, and Micronesian languages. THE GEOGRAPHIC All other languages include Uralic languages, such as Hungarian; DISTRIBUTION OF PEOPLE the Semitic languages, such as Arabic and Hebrew; languages of WHO SPOKE A LANGUAGE Africa; native North American languages, including the American OTHER THAN ENGLISH Indian and Alaska native languages; and some indigenous languages AT HOME of Central and South America. This section discusses the geo- graphic distribution of the popula- tion aged 5 and over who stated in 25.6 million people). When they 7.0 million Asian and Pacific Island- Census 2000 that they spoke a lan- are combined with those who language speakers spoke English guage other than English at home. spoke only English at home, “Very well” (3.4 million). Of the 92 percent of the population aged 1.9 million people who composed The West had the greatest 5 and over had no difficulty speak- the All other language category, number and proportion of non- ing English. The proportion of the 1.3 million spoke English English-language speakers.5 population aged 5 and over who “Very well.” People who spoke languages other spoke English less than “Very well” After English and Spanish, Chinese than English at home were not dis- grew from 4.8 percent in 1980, to was the language most commonly tributed equally across or within 6.1 percent in 1990, and to 8.1 spoken at home (2.0 million speak- regions in 2000.6 While the West percent in 2000. ers), followed by French (1.6 mil- In Figure 2, the number of speak- lion speakers) and German 4 The changes in ranks between 1990 ers of the four major language (1.4 million speakers, see Figure 3). and 2000 have not been tested and may not groups (Spanish, Other Indo- Reflecting historical patterns of be statistically significant. 5 Hereafter, this report uses the term European languages, Asian and immigration, the numbers of “non-English-language speakers” to refer to Pacific Island languages, and All Italian, Polish, and German speak- people who spoke a language other than English at home, regardless of their ability to other languages) are shown by ers fell between 1990 and 2000, speak English (see Table 1). how well they spoke English (see while the number of speakers of 6 The Northeast region includes the states of Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New text box above).
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