Amid the current immigration debate, the U.S. Census Bureau released a report on Tuesday analyzing the different languages spoken in the country.
The Bureau's findings provide "illustrative evidence of the continuing and growing role of non-English languages as part of the national fabric," says the report.
Flickr photo by Justin Taylor"I Voted" stickers in English, Tagalog and Vietnamese
"Fueled by both long-term historic immigration patterns and more recent ones, the language diversity of the country has increased over the past few decades."
Based on the U.S.'s current immgration trends, the "pattern of language diversity will also likely continue," the report concludes.
Among the more than 55 million Americans who speak a language other than English at home, roughly 34.5 million speak Spanish, making it the second-most-spoken language in the U.S.
After English and Spanish, "Chinese (2.5 million speakers) was the language most commonly spoken at home."
"Five other languages have at least 1 million speakers: Tagalog (1.5 million speakers), French (1.4 million speakers), Vietnamese (1.2 million speakers), German (1.1 million speakers) and Korean (1.1 million speakers)," according to the study's press release.
California had high concentrations of Spanish, Chinese and Korean speakers.
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