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?