Nearly 650,000 people speak Hindi in the US.
By Raif Karerat
Hindi has proliferated throughout the United States enough to emerge as the largest Indian language spoken on American soil, with nearly 650,000 currently speaking it, according to the latest Census data.
Based on American Community Survey data collected from 2009 to 2013, the U.S. Census Bureau said that more than 60 million people in the U.S. speak a language other than English at home, 25 million of whom speak English.
Nearly 400,000 U.S. residents speak Urdu, while Gujurati is spoken by more than 370,000 people.
While Bengali and Punjabi are spoken by more than 250,000 people each, the Census Bureau reported Marathi is spoken by more than 73,000 people, Oriya by more than 5,000, Assamese about 1300, and Kashmiri by about 1700 people in the U.S.
Nearly 250,000 people speak Telugu while Tamil is spoken by about 190,000 people, Malayalam about 146,000 people, and Kannada about 48,000.
It even listed Bihari as a language spoken by nearly 600 people and Rajasthani by about 700.
The most spoken languages other than English within U.S. 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).
“While most of the U.S. 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 U.S.,†said Erik Vickstrom, a Census Bureau statistician, regarding the data.
“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 continued.