Skip to main content

Language and the Census

One of the very specific items in the U.S. Constitution from its beginning is the requirement to enumerate the population every ten years.  The decennial census is a big undertaking, made even more challenging this year by the Coronavirus pandemic. Fortunately they had already planned to get most of the information by online questionnaires (which I already filled out), so they can more easily limit human contact and virus transmission.

An interesting side effect of the constitution’s simple wording -- that makes no mention of citizenship or national origin in the count -- is that we must reach out to residents in their own language.  They have determined that there are twelve languages with at least 60,000 households that do not speak English well enough to complete the survey; so they translate all the questionnaires into those twelve languages.  Further, there are 59 languages with at least 2000 households (that do not speak English well enough to understand the process), for which they have created instruction sheets. The main secondary language is of course Spanish, but Arabic is also included in both groups.  
The 12:  Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, Russian, Arabic, Tagalog, Polish, French, Haitian Creole, Portuguese, and Japanese.
(unclear which “Chinese” this refers to, as Mandarin and Cantonese are quite distinct)
The 59: 

Spanish
Haitian Creole
Bengali
Romanian
Tamil
Tigrinya
Igbo
Chinese
Portuguese
Greek
Telugu
Navajo
Ilocano
Marathi
Vietnamese
Japanese
Amharic
Burmese
Hungarian
Dutch
Sinhala
Korean
Italian
Somali
Punjabi
Hebrew
Croatian
Slovak
Russian
Farsi
Thai
Lao
Malayalam
Bulgarian
American Sign Language
Arabic
German
Gjurati
Hmong
Swahili
Twi

Tagalog
Armenian
Khmer
Albanian
Yiddish
Lithuanian

Polish
Hindi
Nepali
Turkish
Indonesia
Yoruba

French
Ukrainian
Urdu
Bosnian
Serbian
Czech


One intriguing realization here is that there is one language listed that is NOT an immigrant language, NOT from another country:  Navajo.

Most of these language communities are logically made up of recent immigrant families who have not yet learned enough English (ESL) to join the dominant economic and social community. Otherwise, I wonder how many of these households are third-generation immigrants -- that is, how many of the language communities are so insular that they maintain their lack of English through a third generation; and of those, how many are choosing to do so freely, typically for religious reasons?  I think of two specific cases: Amish (German) and Hasidic (Yiddish), but perhaps Navajo could be considered as well? 

Do we know of any other cultural groups that are determinedly isolationist?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review: Jerusalem, Jerusalem: How the Ancient City Ignited Our Modern World

Jerusalem, Jerusalem: How the Ancient City Ignited Our Modern World by James Carroll My rating: 4 of 5 stars Fascinating comprehensive worldview, with Jesuitical logic in a broad sweep that links religion in a circular way to violence and the solution to violence. The author shows a great command of history and religion, with extensive endnotes to support or expand upon most of his claims; however, some sweeping indictments will certainly be resisted by the more fundamentalist People Of The Book (that is, the Abrahamic religions). A core symbolic thread is Abraham's near-sacrifice of Isaac on Mt.Moriah, the supposed site later called Jerusalem -- the author deftly cites that scene throughout the many centuries since the original event, demonstrating the human tendency to misinterpret that near-sacrifice in order to rationalize our own tendency to violence and scapegoating. I started the book in audio form, but found it unlistenable -- the author's c...
Post a Comment
Read more

Kite Runner is with us again

 Six or so years ago, I taught The Kite Runner to three successive sets of tenth-graders, and marveled at the effect the novel had on me and on these adolescents.  That age is a marvelous time for a humanities teacher, as we see callous children grow out of their self-centered cocoons and flex their world-empathic feelers.  They grow into the world outside them and realize they truly have agency -- or will have agency and responsibility for human actions.  Amir, the main protagonist of Kite Runner is so identifiable with those adolescents learning to take responsibility for their callous actions.   And of course we think of Kite Runner now that Afghanistan once again plunges into Taliban rule -- we particularly worry about the fate of the Hazara (news stories already cite random executions of Hazara men).   We can only wring hands and pray that the Taliban will have to adapt and tolerate more than they did before -- but I am not optimistic. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Related Reviews: This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race then Attack Surface

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth My rating: 5 of 5 stars And the hits just keep on coming! This excellent book details an unrelenting onslaught of cyberattacks, and outlines the author's own gradual realization of the dangers of internet warfare. It is a lengthy but worthwhile read -- actually, I lost the book for a while because I did not want to read it at bedtime, for fear of nightmares or disrupted sleep! Indeed the book is changing my stance toward online security -- multi-factor authentication, definitely! As with most of us, the author first downplayed the fear tactics promoted by sellers of security packages; but after years of research she has come to wonder that more disaster has not happened yet. She briefly but baldly calls out the recent presidentical administration for wreaking havoc on US defense, by eliminating a cybersecurity department, incensing the Iranian and Chinese gover...
Post a Comment
Read more