Washington – In 14 million U.S. households, people speak a language other than English, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday.
Three million of those homes are “linguistically isolated,” where all members 14 and older have at least some difficulty with English, the report found.
The Census Bureau data, based on the 2000 census, also showed that one in five people older than 5 in the U.S. spoke a language other than English that year and that 21 million spoke English less than “very well.” The report included details about foreign language speakers in each state, including income and education levels.
In 178,142 Colorado households, another language besides English is spoken at home, accounting for about 12 percent of 1.5 million households in the state.
Statewide, 45,593 households were considered “linguistically isolated, accounting for 3 percent of total Colorado households in 2000.
Of the linguistically isolated Colorado households, 75 percent are headed by people who were foreign-born; 41 percent of those entered the U.S. between 1990 and 2000. The longer families had been in the U.S., the less likely they were to be linguistically isolated.
Educationally, 53 percent of the state’s linguistically isolated households did not have a resident who had completed high school; 14 percent had members with a bachelor’s degree or higher.
In Colorado, 604,019 people, 15 percent of the population older than age 5, speak a language other than English at home; 267,504 – about 6 percent – speak English “less than very well.”
Staff writer Elizabeth Aguilera contributed to this report.
