Foreign language speakers has surged 1980- 2018. 45% of them are U.S.born.

The surge is not news; the fact that non-English is embedded among U.S. born citizens is. This means that one tenth of U.S.born residents – citizens from birth speak primarily a language other than English at home.

The Center for Immigration Studies describes the growth of persons (five years or older) in the U.S. who speak a language other than English at home. One in five U.S. residents, or 67.3 million residents in the United States now speak a language other than English at home. The number has nearly tripled since 1980, and more than doubled since 1990. I will cover some of CIS’s report in this post, and include more findings in a follow up post.

Since 1980, the number who speak a foreign language at home grew nearly seven times faster than the number who speak only English at home. Even since 2010, the number of foreign-language speakers increased more than twice as fast as that of English speakers

Languages with more than a million people who speak it at home in 2018 were Spanish (41.5 million), Chinese (3.5 million), Tagalog (1.8 million), Vietnamese (1.5 million), Arabic (1.3 million), French (1.2 million), and Korean (1.1 million).

Of those who speak a foreign language at home, 45% were born in the United States.

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