Language Spoken at Home
How the Census categorizes language use and what ‘Other Languages’ includes
Language categories tracked by the Census
The Census Bureau groups write-in language responses into broader categories so they can be reported consistently across neighborhoods and districts. The table below shows each named language group and the languages it includes.
| Language group | Examples of languages included |
|---|---|
| Spanish | Spanish, Ladino |
| French, Haitian, or Cajun | French, Cajun, Haitian Creole |
| German or Other West Germanic | German, Luxembourgish, Dutch, Yiddish |
| Russian, Polish, or Other Slavic | Russian, Polish, Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Czech, Ukrainian |
| Other Indo-European | Italian, Sicilian, Portuguese, Kabuverdianu, Greek, Armenian, Iranian Persian (Farsi), Dari, Gujarati, Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Bengali, Nepali, Marathi, Albanian, Lithuanian, Pashto, Romanian, Swedish |
| Korean | Korean |
| Chinese (incl. Mandarin, Cantonese) | Mandarin Chinese, Min Nan Chinese (incl. Taiwanese), Yue Chinese (Cantonese) |
| Vietnamese | Vietnamese |
| Tagalog (incl. Filipino) | Tagalog, Filipino |
| Other Asian and Pacific Island | Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Japanese, Hmong, Khmer (Cambodian), Thai, Lao, Burmese, Karen, Turkish, Uzbek, Cebuano, Hawaiian, Iloko, Indonesian, Samoan |
| Arabic | Arabic |
| Other and unspecified | Navajo, Apache, Cherokee, Lakota, Tohono O’odham, Yupik languages, Hebrew, Amharic, Chaldean Neo-Aramaic, Somali, Tigrinya, Akan, Igbo, Wolof, Yoruba, Ganda, Kinyarwanda, Lingala, Swahili, Hungarian, Jamaican Creole English, unspecified responses, and many others |
What is the “Other Languages” row on district pages?
The “Other Languages” row on district pages combines two things:
Languages not enumerated above — the Census Bureau groups all write-in responses that don’t fit a named category into a single “other and unspecified languages” bucket. Languages like Amharic, Somali, Yoruba, Hebrew, and many Indigenous languages fall here and cannot be separated out.
Named language groups below 1% — any of the 11 named groups in the table above that account for less than 1% of a district’s population age 5 and over are also folded into “Other Languages” to avoid presenting unreliable small-sample estimates.
Sources: U.S. Census Bureau, ACS table C16001; U.S. Census Bureau, Note for Language Spoken at Home from the 2016 American Community Survey; U.S. Census Bureau, About Language Use in the U.S. Population.