Italian declining in the United States

Monday, August 26, 2013

Came across an article in Italian here today about the declining numbers of speakers of Italian when taking into account the numbers in the 1980 census versus that done in 2011. These are numbers referring to the languages spoken at home, so they don't have all that much to do with the numbers of those studying these languages, and of course immigration has a great deal to do with these numbers as well. Italian has gone from 1.6 million to 723,000.

Near the bottom of the article is a helpful graph showing the relative increase or decrease by language.


Italian: down 55.2%
Yiddish: down 51%
German: down 32.7%
Polish: down 25.9%
Greek: down 23.5%
Japanese: up 31.9%
French or creole: up 33.4%
Serbo-croatian: up 89.1%
Portuguese or creole: up 95.6%
Filipino: up 231.9%
Spanish or creole: up 232.8%
Persian: up 256.5%
Korean: up 327.1%


There is also a map below showing where the Italian speakers live, and the vast majority of them are in an area stretching from Chicago to the east coast.

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