For example 192 different languages are spoken in New York metro area homes and 38 percent of the population over the age of five speaks a language other than English at home.
Advertisement
One in four households in the Washington region speaks a language other than English, the Census Bureau said Tuesday.
The survey is divided into two major groups: English-only speakers and speakers of a language other than English.
The survey’s results show the nation’s largest metropolitan areas are also a few of the most linguistically diverse.
Additionally, more than half of the population of Los Angeles, 54 percent, speaks a language other than English at home and at least 185 languages are represented. The data also shows there are more than 350,000 US speakers of 150 different Native American dialects, such as Navajo, Apache, Dakota, Choctaw and Cherokee.
New York is first with 192. If you speak Bengali at home, you have company. However, Steven A. Camarota, a demographer at the Center for Immigration Studies, was skeptical about drawing such conclusions from the data without understanding cultural differences.
Within each language category the Census Bureau details how many people do not speak English well. “It doesn’t mean that it’s meaningless, it just means that Asians might judge themselves much harsher”, he said.
Advertisement
These are the most comprehensive data ever released from the Census Bureau on languages spoken less widely in the United States, such as Pennsylvania Dutch, Ukrainian, Turkish, Romanian, Amharic and many others. Most frequently spoken were Spanish (19 percent of total residents), any Chinese language (7.5 percent) and Vietnamese (6.6 percent). Policymakers are also concerned with the self-reported English-speaking levels as a growing percentage of K-12 students and adults are designated English language learners (ELLs).
