Hillsborough Community Atlas
Data on ability to speak English were obtained from the 2000 US Census long-form questionnaire. Respondents who reported that they spoke a language other than English were asked to indicate their ability to speak English in one of the following categories: "Very well," "Well," "Not well," or "Not at all."
The data on ability to speak English represent the person's own perception about his or her own ability to speak English.
The following table provides examples of the languages included in each category listed on the Hillsborough Community Atlas.
| Language Group | Examples |
|---|---|
| Spanish | Spanish and Spanish Creole languages |
| Other Indo-European languages | French(French, Cajun, Patois) |
| French Creole, Haitian Creole | |
| Italian | |
| Portuguese and Portuguese Creole | |
| German | |
| Yiddish | |
| Other West Germanic languages (Dutch, Pennsylvania Dutch, Afrikaans) | |
| Scandinavian languages (Danish, Norwegian, Swedish) | |
| Greek | |
| Russian | |
| Polish | |
| Serbo-Croatian(Serbo-Croatian, Croatian, Serbian) | |
| Other Slavic languages (Czech, Slovak, Ukrainian) | |
| Armenian | |
| Persian | |
| Gujarati | |
| Hindi | |
| Urdu | |
| Other Indic languages (Bengali, Marathi, Punjabi, Romany) | |
| Other Indo-European languages (Albanian, Gaelic, Lithuanian, Rumanian) | |
| Asian and Pacific Island languages | Chinese(Cantonese, Formosan, Mandarin) |
| Japanese | |
| Korean | |
| Mon-Khmer, Cambodian | |
| Miao, Hmong | |
| Thai | |
| Laotian | |
| Vietnamese | |
| Other Asian languages (Dravidian languages such as Malayalam, Telugu, Tamil, Turkish) | |
| Tagalog | |
| Other Pacific Island languages (Chamorro, Hawaiian, Ilocano, Indonesian, Samoan) |
In recent years, there has been an increase in the percentage of U.S. residents who primarily speak a language other than English. According to the 2000 census, 47.0 million (18 percent) of the 262.4 million people aged 5 years and older spoke a language other than English at home. This percentage increased from 14 percent in 1990 and from 11 percent in 1980.
In 2000, approximately 4.5 percent of the U.S. population could have been considered linguistically isolated due to their inability to speak English well. Among certain subpopulations, however, the percentage of people who said they spoke English less than very well was high: 51 percent of individuals spoke an Asian or Pacific Island language, 49 percent spoke Spanish, and 34 percent spoke another Indo-European language. The types of languages spoken within linguistically isolated households across the United States vary by region.
The language barrier between individuals who speak English "not well" or "not at all" and the general population may pose a barrier to receipt of medical and social services. The inability to speak English well can also slow down immigrants' process of adjustment to the new society that they had entered. Finally, low English proficiency can limit students' acquisition of English or mastery of academic content.
This data is collected and reported as part of the 2000 U.S. Census.
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