Washington: Hindi has emerged as the largest spoken Indian language in the United States, with nearly 650,000 people speaking it, according to the latest Census data. The US Census Bureau data collected from 2009 to 2013, said that more than 60 million people in the US speak a language other than English at home, 25 million of whom speak English.
Other top languages
Top languages other than English spoken in the US homes include Spanish (with more than 37.4 million speakers), Chinese (about 2.9 million), French (1.3 million), Korean (1.1 million), German (1.1 million), Vietnamese (1.4 million), Arabic (924,573), Tagalog (1.6 million) and Russian (879,434).
Hindi tops the list from India with nearly 650,000 speakers. Nearly 400,000 US residents speak Urdu and Gujarati is spoken by more than 370,000 people. Other than Hindi, all the major Indian languages are also spoken in the US.
While Bengali and Punjabi are spoken by more than 250,000 people each, the Census bureau says Marathi is spoken by more than 73,000 people, Oriya (more than 5,000), Assamese (about 1,300) and Kashmiri by about 1,700 people in the US.
It has even listed Bihari as a language spoken by nearly 600 people and Rajasthani by about 700.
Nepali is spoken by more than 94,000 people and Sindhi by nearly 9,000. Nearly 2,50,000 people speak Telugu while Tamil is spoken by about 190,000 people, Malayalam (about 1,46,000 people) and Kannada (about 48,000).
Tribal language Munda is spoken by more than 2,000 people and Tibetan by over 16,000. These are the most comprehensive data ever released from the Census Bureau on languages spoken less widely in the US, such as Pennsylvania Dutch, Ukrainian, Turkish, Romanian, Amharic and many others.
Also included are 150 different Native North American languages, collectively spoken by more than 3,50,000 people, including Yupik, Dakota, Apache, Keres and Cherokee.
Linguistic diversity
“While most of the US population speaks only English at home or a handful of other languages like Spanish or Vietnamese, the American Community Survey released the wide-ranging language diversity of the US,” said Erik Vickstrom, a Census Bureau statistician.
“For example, in the New York metro area alone, more than a third of the population speaks a language other than English at home, and close to 200 different languages are spoken. Knowing the number of languages and how many speak these languages in a particular area provides valuable information to policymakers, planners and researchers,” he said.
