Population
California is the most populous sub-national entity in North America. If it were an independent country, California would rank 34th in population in the world, however it has a bigger population than all of Canada. Its population is one third larger than that of the next largest state, Texas. California surpassed New York state to become the most populous state in 1962. As of 2006, California had an estimated population of 37,172,015, more than 12 percent of the U.S. population. This includes a natural increase since the last census of 1,557,112 people (that is 2,781,539 births minus 1,224,427 deaths) and an increase due to net migration of 751,419 people. Immigration resulted in a net increase of 1,415,879 people, and migration from within the U.S. produced a net increase of 564,100 people. California is the 13th fastest-growing state. As of 2008, the total fertility rate was 2.15. No single racial or ethnic group forms a majority of California's population, making the state a minority-majority state. Non-Hispanic whites make up 40.1% of the population. Spanish is the state's second most spoken language. Areas with especially large Spanish speaking populations include the Los Angeles metropolitan area, the US-Mexico border counties of San Diego and Imperial, and the San Joaquin Valley. Nearly 43% of California residents speak a language other than English at home, a proportion far higher than any other state. |
Read more about this topic: Religion In California Famous quotes containing the word population:“The paid wealth which hundreds in the community acquire in trade, or by the incessant expansions of our population and arts, enchants the eyes of all the rest; the luck of one is the hope of thousands, and the bribe acts like the neighborhood of a gold mine to impoverish the farm, the school, the church, the house, and the very body and feature of man.” “I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.” “What happened at Hiroshima was not only that a scientific breakthrough ... had occurred and that a great part of the population of a city had been burned to death, but that the problem of the relation of the triumphs of modern science to the human purposes of man had been explicitly defined.” | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||