Language Ability

Looking at the Census data, I came across what languages people spoke in the US and how it correlated with their speaking ability in English.

The following two tables give the percentage of people who cannot speak English well, divided based on their native language. The first table further divides the data into people born in the US or outside while the second table organizes the data according to age.

It is clear that the foreign-born population has more problems with English as was expected. However, there is a huge difference there between Spanish-speakers and others. I understand that Hispanics are probably among the poorest immigrants and also might have lower levels of education. Another contributing factor might be the presence of ethnic enclaves making it easier for those who do not speak English to survive.

I am surprised at the numbers for native-born people. That’s a pretty large number of people who do not speak English well despite being born in the US. Why is that? One can think of reasons for Spanish-speakers but what about others? Do these people go to school? Is our school system so broken?

The 65 and over group we should just ignore. Their practical life is over and they don’t have either the incentive or the inclination to learn a new language. The 18-64 years group is in the labor force. Don’t these guys have some incentive to learn English well? The speakers of Spanish and Asian (that’s East Asian) languages do not do well here. The children do much better, but then children learn languages very easily. They should be doing much better. The Spanish-speakers again are dead last.

Does anyone have any insights or studies about this topic?

In case you are wondering, I am bilingual. My first language is Urdu (similar to Hindi in the spoken form, though written in the Arabic/Persian script). Urdu is part of the Indo-European group of languages. I learned English in school starting in the first grade and went to a K-12 school and college where the medium of instruction was English. In my adult life, I have tried to learn a few languages (French, Arabic, Persian) without much success.