Language Spoken at Home (U.S. Census)

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Language Spoken at Home is a data set published by the United States Census Bureau on languages in the United States. In 2000 and 1990 it was a part of Summary File 3, collected from the long-form questionnaire which was distributed to 1 out of 6 households. The data set by governments and other organizations in determining which languages to use in a specific geographic area, for instance in voting machines, literature for voters, and material for public libraries. This question was first asked in 1980; it replaced a question about one's mother language.[1]

The published data are for 30 languages, chosen for their nationwide distribution, and 10 language groupings (see list below). Data from households which report languages other than the 30 are reported under the language groupings. Thus, languages which are widespread in certain areas of the country but not nationally get put together, even in block level data. Albanian, Lithuanian, and Welsh are simply "Other Indo-European languages," Yoruba and Somali are simply "African languages," and Indonesian and Syriac are simply "Other Asian languages." Several locally very well-represented languages, such as Punjabi and Pennsylvania German, are collated into smaller groupings. Native North American languages besides Navajo are also collated, though they are reported on several geographic levels in another data set.

[edit] Languages and language groupings

Language Spoken at Home (U.S. Census 2000) Summary
English only 82.105%
Spanish 10.710%
Chinese (all spoken varieties incl.) 0.78%
French (incl. Patois, Cajun) 0.627%
German 0.527%
Tagalog 0.467%
Vietnamese 0.385%
Italian 0.384%
Korean 0.341%
Russian 0.269%
Polish 0.254%
Arabic 0.234%
Portuguese or Portuguese Creole 0.215%
Japanese 0.182%
French Creole 0.173%
Other Indic languages 0.167%
African languages 0.160%
Other Asian languages 0.152%
Greek 0.139%
Other Indo-European languages 0.242%
Hindi 0.121%
Persian 0.119%
Other Slavic languages 0.115%
Urdu 0.100%
Dutch (and Afrikaans) 0.096%
Gujarati 0.090%
Serbo-Croatian 0.089%
Other Native American languages 0.078%
Armenian 0.077%
Hebrew 0.074%
Mon, Khmer 0.069%
Yiddish 0.068%
Navajo 0.068%
Hmong 0.064%
North Germanic languages 0.062%
Lao 0.057%
Thai 0.046%
Hungarian 0.045%
All other and unspecified 0.055%

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ Data on Languages used at home (US Census)
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