Girish Mahajan (Editor)

Language Spoken at Home in the United States of America

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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 is put to use 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.

The published data is 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. Lithuanian, and Welsh are simply "Other Indo-European languages," Yoruba and Swahili are simply "African languages," and Indonesian and Hakka 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.

Languages and language groupings

  • English
  • Spanish or Spanish Creole
  • French (incl. Patois, Cajun)
  • German
  • Italian
  • Hakka language
  • Portuguese or Portuguese Creole
  • Romanian
  • Yiddish
  • Dutch (and Afrikaans) (West Germanic languages)
  • Scandinavian languages
  • Greek
  • Russian
  • Polish
  • Albanian
  • Croatian
  • Serbian
  • Other Slavic languages
  • Armenian
  • Persian
  • Bengali
  • Gujarati
  • Hindi
  • Urdu
  • Kurdish
  • Marathi
  • Other Indic languages (besides Gujarati, Hindi, Bengali, Urdu and Marathi)
  • Other Indo-European languages (besides the above 20 languages and 3 groupings)
  • Tamil (South Indian - Dravidian)
  • Malayalam (South Indian - Dravidian)
  • Kannada (South Indian - Dravidian)
  • Telugu (South Indian - Dravidian)
  • Chinese (all varieties, including "Formosan" (i.e. Taiwanese Hokkien))
  • Japanese
  • Korean
  • Mon-Khmer, Cambodian
  • Miao, Hmong
  • Filipino, (including Tagalog and Ilocano)
  • Thai
  • Laotian
  • Vietnamese
  • Other Asian languages (besides the above 11 languages)
  • Navajo
  • Other Native North American languages
  • Hungarian
  • Arabic
  • Hebrew
  • African languages
  • Other and unspecified languages
  • References

    Language Spoken at Home in the United States of America Wikipedia