Number of Chinese speakers in US rises 360pc in 30 years

The number of Chinese speakers in the United States has increased by almost 360 per cent over the past 30 years, new government data has revealed.

The US Census Bureau report, “Language Use in the United States: 2011”, released on Tuesday shows that there were nearly 2.9 million people speaking Chinese in 2011 – up almost 360 per cent from 1980.

After English and Spanish, Chinese was the third most commonly spoken language in the country – a status it has held since at least 2007 – according to data collected about people who speak a language other than English at home.

In its report, the Census Bureau defined Chinese as including the following group of languages and dialects: Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka, Kan (Gan), Hsiang (Xiang), Fuchow (Fuzhou), Formosan and Wu.

Speaker numbers of other Asian languages also grew rapidly from 1980 to 2011.

As of 2011, Tagalog, Vietnamese and Korean each had more than a million speakers and all of them were among the top 10 most commonly spoken languages in the US.

Vietnamese speakers saw the largest percentage increase of nearly 600 per cent but Chinese speakers had the second-highest numerical gains after Spanish.