Language
In 2010, there were 2.8 million people (5 and older) who spoke a Chinese language at home; after Spanish language it is the most common non-English language in the United States. Other sizeable Asian languages are Tagalog, Vietnamese, and Korean, with all three having more than 1 million speakers in the United States. In 2012, Alaska, California, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Texas and Washington were publishing election material in Asian languages in accordance with the Voting Rights Act; these languages include Tagalog, Mandarin Chinese, Vietnamese, Hindi and Bengali. Election materials were also available in Gujarati, Japanese, Khmer, Korean, and Thai. According to a poll conducted by the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund in 2013, it found that 48 percent of Asian Americans considered media in their native language as their primary news source.
According to the 2000 Census, the more prominent languages of the Asian American community include the Chinese languages (Cantonese, Taishanese, and Hokkien), Tagalog, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, Hindi, Urdu, and Gujarati. In 2008, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Tagalog, and Vietnamese languages are all used in elections in Alaska, California, Hawaii, Illinois, New York, Texas, and Washington state.
Read more about this topic: Demographics Of Asian Americans
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“They who in folly or mere greed
Enslaved religion, markets, laws,
Borrow our language now and bid
Us to speak up in freedom’s cause.”
—Cecil Day Lewis (1904–1972)
“After all, when you come right down to it, how many people speak the same language even when they speak the same language?”
—Russell Hoban (b. 1925)
“The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book—a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)