No English in five per cent of US families

September 12, 2007
Editorial

WASHINGTON : Nearly five per cent of American families, or around 14 million people, speak little or no English, data released by the US Census Bureau showed Wednesday.

Of the 111.6 million households in the US, each with an average 2.61 family members, 4.8 per cent were "linguistically isolated," meaning everyone aged 14 or older in the households had difficulty speaking English, a report issued by the Census Bureau showed.

In California , the most populous state, the ratio of linguistically isolated households rose to one in 10.

Spanish was spoken in 27.6 per cent of linguistically isolated households, followed by Asian languages at 27.4 per cent and languages besides Spanish from the Indo-European family, at 16.5 per cent.

Around 44 million Hispanics live in the United States , representing around 15 per cent of the US population of nearly 303 million.

The data also showed that one in five US citizens over the age of five speak a language other than English at home, although the majority of them (60 per cent) spoke English very well.

That marked a rise since 2000 of about eight million who don't speak English at home.

California, which shares a border with Mexico, had the highest percentage of homes in which English was not spoken, at 42.5 per cent, followed by New Mexico (36.5 per cent) and Texas (33.8 per cent), both of which also border Mexico.

In Los Angeles , one of the biggest cities in the United States , more than half of all people over the age of five -- 53.4 per cent -- spoke a language other than English at home.