Ethnicity & Immigration - Minorities: Linguistic

Language is another lens through which we may view minorities. Many languages are spoken daily in the United States. Shown in the graphic are foreign tongues ranked second to 16th. The 50th ranked language, Amharic (spoken in Ethiopia) had 31,505 speakers as of the 1990 Census.

The language most common, after English, is Spanish. Spanish is not shown on the graphic so that the other languages can be made more visible — but a view of the proportion of Spanish to the other foreign languages can be seen in the inset graphic. While 17.3 million people speak Spanish, the next largest language group, French, only has 1.7 million speakers, one tenth that of the language of the Conquistadors.

Languages of Europe hold the first four spots — Spanish, French, German, and Italian. Virtually all European languages appear in the list of the first 50. A complete list is provided in Part II of this volume. There were, for instance, nearly 36,000 Danish speakers, 54,000 Finnish speakers, and 148,000 Hungarian speakers in 1990.

Asian languages — Chinese, Tagalog (spoken in the Philippines), Korean, Vietnamese, and Japanese comprise the top 16.

Data of this type are collected every 10 years in the Census of the Population. Data for the 2000 Census are not yet available; hence we are looking here at old photographs of the linguistic landscape. In 1990, however, 31.8 million people spoke a foreign language, 13.8% of the population.

The Census identifies the English-speaking ability of these people as part of its data collection effort. Seventy-nine percent of these people speak English well or very well; 5.8% do not speak English at all, some 1.8 million people.

The linguistic groups with the highest English-language skills are, in order of rank, speakers of Kru, Danish, Dutch, Swedish, and Hebrew. Kru is spoken in Liberia. 97.5% of Kru speakers speak English well or very well.

The five groups with the lowest English skills are (arranged from the bottom up) speakers of Miao (the Hmong), Mon-Khmer (Cambodians), Korean, Chinese, and Vietnamese. Only 53.7% of Miao speakers speak English well or very well.

Among Spanish speakers, the largest linguistic minority, 74% speak English well or very well and 6.2% do not speak English at all, a group of some 1.46 million people. This, perhaps, is the root of pressures to teach school, in certain areas, in the native tongue of those attending.

Some concluding notes: French does not include French Creole (spoken by more than 187,000 people) or Cajun (nearly 34,000 people); these languages have their own classifications. Individuals reporting three languages, e.g., Russian, French, and Yiddish, will be counted three times in this survey.

Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census. 1990 Census of Population. CPHL-133. "Detailed Language Spoken at Home and Ability to Speak English for Persons 5 Years and Over -50 Languages with Greatest Number of Speakers: United States, 1990."