A quarter of young adults now use a language other than English at home
Article publisher:
Daily Mail
Article date:
14 March 2015
Article category:
Our American Future
Medium
Article Body:
- Fifty-seven per cent of 18 to 34-year-olds in LA don't speak English at home
- Proportion of foreign-born residents has actually decreased in the city
- More than half of Millennials speak non-English language in Miami, San Jose
- Immigrant children and grandchildren keep knowledge of family's language
More than half of young adults in Los Angeles can fluently speak a language other than English, despite the fact that the city's percentage of foreign born residents is decreasing.
Fifty-seven per cent of those aged 18 to 34, in LA spoke a language other than English at home, beating out Miami which had 55 per cent and San Jose with 54 per cent.
Roughly a quarter of the 'Millenial' generation nationwide uses another language, according to the American Community Survey...
However, the proportion of foreign-born adults in Los Angeles has actually decreased 9 percentage points to a little less than a third since 1990, and a large number of the Millenials with foreign language skills are thought to be bilingual...
A map of young adults' ability to speak a language other than English uses dark red for counties where more than 40 per cent of 18 to 34-year-olds communicate in a foreign language at home, and lighter shades of pink for smaller proportions of the population.
California has seen a growing percentage of its young adults speaking foreign languages (bars in blue) since the 1980s. The US as a whole (pink bars) has also seen its rate increase at a slower pace.