A recent report from the US Census Bureau provides a reminder of the importance of working to appeal to a multicultural audience.
The report, “Language Use in the United States: 2019,” which uses data from the American Community Survey, reveals that the number of people in the country who spoke a language other than English at home tripled from 1980 to 2019, going from 23.1 million to 67.8 million during that time. That 2019 number represents approximately 20% of the population.
The five most frequently spoken languages other than English in US homes in 2019, according to the report, are Spanish or Spanish Creole (accounting for 61.6% of those who speak languages other than English at home), Chinese (5.2%), Tagalog (2.6%), Vietnamese (2.3%) and Arabic (1.9%).
Among adults aged 60 or more years, however, Tagalog was the most frequently spoken language in the home other than English of the five aforementioned ones, followed by Chinese, Vietnamese, Spanish and, finally, Arabic.
The data also detail the rates that adults over 60 and others in the US speak French and Cajun; German and other West Germanic languages; Russian, Polish and other Slavic languages; other Indo-European languages; Haitian; Korean; and other Asian and Pacific Island languages.
Results, of course, will vary by geography. And English is still the most commonly spoken language in homes in the United States, according to the Census Bureau. The report shows that from 1980 to 2019, the number of people who spoke only English at home also increased, growing from 187.2 million to 241 million in 2019.
Lois A. Bowers is the editor of McKnight’s Senior Living. Read her other columns here.
