IN 14 million US households, people speak a language other than English, according to a new US Census Bureau study released last month.
The data showed that three million of those homes are "linguistically isolated," where all members 14 years and older have at least some difficulty with English.
The report also found that 21 million people in the US spoke English less than "very well".
Almost one in four New Yorkers admit that they can't speak English well, almost three times the national average, according to the Census Bureau data. Spanish is the No. 1 foreign language spoken in New York, with 1.8 million speakers here. Chinese is New York's second-most popular foreign language with about 360,000 speakers.
"If New York is a place of opportunity, then when you don't know the language, that's opportunity lost," said David Chen, executive director of the Chinese-American Planning Council of New York.
Nationally, 47 million people in the US speak a foreign language, including 24.8 million Hispanics or Latinos, 7.5 million Asians, 2.2 million African-Americans, 631,000 American Indians or Alaska Natives and 152,000 native Hawaiians or other Pacific Islanders.
Steven Camarota, director of research at the Centre for US Immigration Studies and head of a think tank that advocates lower levels of immigration, said the high number of Spanish speakers nationwide presents an unprecedented dominance of one language among foreign residents in the US.
"If one group becomes large enough, we create the critical mass necessary to find employment, go shopping, buy a newspaper, listen to the radio or watch TV ... and you can do it all in your foreign language," he said. "There you might be beginning to change fundamentally the dynamics of language integration and assimilation."
But Harry Pachon, president of the Tomás Rivera Policy Institute, said that the large number of foreign language speakers in the US is a consequence of recent immigration, not evidence that immigrants are refusing to learn English. The Tomás Rivera Policy Institute is a Latino think tank and a policy research organization headquartered at the University of Southern California.
"When you do surveys of Latino parents, you find out that 97 per cent of them want their children to learn English," Pachon said.
In addition, he said that there is a process of language acquisition which takes time and that immigrants who come to the US are eager to learn English in order to succeed in the US.
"We're not getting the complacent, self-satisfied immigrant. We're getting the people who are trying to improve their lives," Pachon said.
Foreign language speakers in the US (47 million)
Spanish speakers: 28 million
Indo-European language speakers: 10 million
Asian and Pacific Island language speakers: 7 million
