My wife and I are arguing our heads of about this. She claims that over 50% of the US population speaks Spanish only, no Enligsh, while I think it’s much closer to <15%.
Anyone? The census doesn’t seem to account for this.
Uh, Hispanics, as a group are only about 13 percent of the U.S. population as a whole.
This site says 1 in 10 households speak Spanish, but half of those also said that they were bilingual in Spanish and English. So even your estimate is high.
50%??? Where in the world would she get that idea?
Sorry, here is the site I mentioned.
Here’s a highly unscientific method.
Turn on your favorite local television. Channel surf.
Note how many stations have programming in English, and how many in Spanish. Ask yourself if that ratio supports your wife’s contention that 50% of the population speaks Spanish only.
I’m sure someone can find a cite soon enough but there is no way that 50% of the US population speaks only spanish. That isn’t even true of border states like here in Arizona where there is a relatively high percentage of spanish only speakers.
On a related note I just stood jury duty in a kidnapping trial related to illegal alien smuggling. Both defendants and all nine of the non-police witness who were directly involved in the case required an interpreter.
Hmm, this is the best cite I could find. Says that nearly 1 in five people living in the US speak a language other than English at home and of those people 55% speak english well. That leads me to conclude whose who speak only spanish is well below 10%.
http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/census_2000/001406.html
50%! :eek:
Spanish-speakers period looks like ~10% in 2000 - 28 million. Cite:
http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/census_2000/001406.html
Those that speak English poorly or not at all are maybe half that number. Maybe. Article:
http://www.asu.edu/educ/epsl/LPRU/features/article5.htm
- Tamerlane
If I do that, I get 50% English, 30% Spanish, the rest Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Then again, I live in L.A. and I don’t have cable, so there could be some skewing of the results there.
I’d be amazed if 50% of the US population spoke any Spanish at all.
Your wife may be confusing the % of the population that speaks a language other than English at home (even if they can speak Enlgish). But even then, the number would be much less than 50%.
With all due respect, your wife seems to be astonishingly ignorant of her native country (assuming that she was born here). She certainly can’t have traveled much.
To further back up the cites already posted by others, this site says:
So that the total percentage of U.S. residents who speak Spanish but do not speak English “very well” would be about 5% of the U.S. population. Since most immigrants try to learn English as quickly as possible, most of those speak at least some English. I would be very surprised if the number of people who speak Spanish but little of no English were more than 1% of the population, and most of those would be very recent immigrants.