At-home Russian is 8th FL in US

[Richard Robin]

Dear SEELANGers,

I came across some census data on at-home language use in the U.S (
http://www.census.gov/prod/2010pubs/acs-12.pdf). The latest figures (2007)
give Russian 851,174 at-home users in the U.S. This makes it the eighth
largest at-home language — seventh if we accept the notion that Spanish with
34.5 million speakers is in fact a second national language. Russian is
beaten out by Chinese, French (including all Francophone variants), Tagalog,
Vietnamese, German, and Korean. Since 1980, Russian has been the second
fastest growing minority language (391% since 1980) after Vietnamese (511%).
German is losing ground (-30%)

I found it interesting that Russian beat out two languages that
traditionally fill language classes with students whose motivation to sign
up is often based on cultural heritage: Italian (9th place with almost
800,000 and a 50% loss since 1980) and Polish (11th place, about 638,000 and
a 22% drop).

Richard Robin


-- 
Richard M. Robin, Ph.D.
Director Russian Language Program
The George Washington University
Washington, DC 20052
202-994-7081
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Russkiy tekst v UTF-8

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