The data I downloaded had two data columns (excepting the margin of error estimates): Number of Speakers and Number who spoke English "Less than very well". Here are the top five languages other than English spoken at home, along with the English only numbers for comparison. The proportion column represents what proportion of all speakers surveyed each language represents.
| Language | Number Of Speakers | Proportion |
|---|---|---|
| English only | 225,488,799 | 0.804 |
| Spanish | 34,183,622 | 0.122 |
| Chinese | 1,554,505 | 0.006 |
| Tagalog | 1,444,324 | 0.005 |
| French | 1,304,758 | 0.005 |
| Vietnamese | 1,204,454 | 0.004 |
"Chinese" represents people who wrote down "Chinese" as another language spoken at home. They also have reported numbers for Mandarin and Cantonese separately, but there's no way to apportion "Chinese" responses to one dialect or the other.
I wondered whether there was a relationship between how many speakers of a language there were, and how many of those speakers spoke English less than very well. You might think that the larger the available speech community for a non-English language, the less need for English there would be.
The answer (at the national level mind you) looks to be "maybe a little," but there's a lot of variation.
Among the Pennsylvania German-speaking “plain people”, a higher degree of religious devoutness (which seems to correlate with higher use of Pennsylvania German in everyday life) correlates with a higher degree of fluent production of English. (That simplifies it a bit, but that’s the core of it.)
ReplyDeleteThere was an effort to count the plain people in last year’s census, but i don’t know if they’re sampled for the American Community Survey, and if they’re not we’re missing a large enough chunk of non-English-as-home-language speakers to possibly skew your results a bit (though probably not hugely).
Given that it's not possible to subdivide "Chinese" into Mandarin and Cantonese, maybe it makes more sense to add the figures for Mandarin and Cantonese into the "Chinese" total data?
ReplyDeleteGiven that it's not possible to subdivide "Chinese" into Mandarin and Cantonese, maybe it makes more sense to add the figures for Mandarin and Cantonese into the "Chinese" total data?
ReplyDelete