When President Obama was running for office he suggested that instead of worrying whether everyone spoke English, Americans should learn to speak Spanish but is that even sufficiently multilingual today?
According to the Center for Immigration Studies, “Newly released Census Bureau data for 2016 shows that a record 65.5 million U.S. residents five years of age and older spoke a language other than English at home. The number is up six million since 2010 and has increased by nearly 34 million since 1990. As a share of the population, more than one in five U.S. residents now speaks a foreign language at home. The largest percentage increases since 2010 among languages with more than 400,000 speakers were for Arabic, Hindi, Urdu, Chinese, Persian, Haitian, and Gujarati. Hindi and Gujarati are spoken in India; Urdu is spoken in Pakistan.”
