Language Spoken at Home and Difficulty Speaking English

Children who speak languages other than English at home and who also have difficulty speaking English17 may face greater challenges progressing in both school and the labor market. Once it is determined that a student speaks another language, school officials must, by law, evaluate the child's facility with English and provide services such as special instruction to improve the child's English, if needed. A limited-English-speaking household is a household in which no one age 14 or over speaks only English at home, and no one age 14 or over speaks a language other than English at home and speaks English "very well."

Indicator FAM5: Percentage of children ages 5–17 who speak a language other than English at home and who have difficulty speaking English or live in a limited-English-speaking household, 2010–2021
Indicator FAM5: Percentage of children ages 5–17 who speak a language other than English at home and who have difficulty speaking English or live in a limited-English-speaking household, 2010–2021

NOTE: Due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Census Bureau changed the 2020 American Community Survey (ACS) release schedule. Instead of providing the standard 1-year data products, the Census Bureau released experimental estimates from the 1-year data. This includes a limited number of data tables for the nation, states, and the District of Columbia. The 2020 ACS 1-year experimental estimates are posted on the 2020 ACS 1-Year Experimental Data Tables page; they are not available on https://data.census.gov/.

SOURCE: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey.

  • In 2021, about 21% of school-age children spoke a language other than English at home, and 5% of school-age children both spoke a language other than English at home and had difficulty speaking English.
  • The percentage of school-age children who spoke a language other than English at home decreased by 1 percentage point from 2010 to 2021, from about 22% to about 21%. At the same time, the number of school-age children who spoke a language other than English at home and had difficulty speaking English stayed roughly level, at about 5% in both 2010 and 2021.
  • In 2010, about 6% of school-age children spoke a language other than English at home and lived in limited-English-speaking households. This percentage declined to about 5% in 2015 and declined again to about 4% in 2021.
  • The percentage of school-age children who spoke a language other than English at home varied by region of the country in 2021, from a low of about 12% in the Midwest to a high of about 30% in the West.
  • In 2021, the percentage of school-age children who had difficulty speaking English also varied by region, from a low of about 3% in the Midwest to a high of 6% in the West.
  • Approximately 52% of school-age Asian-alone children and 56% of school-age Hispanic children spoke a language other than English at home in 2021 compared with about 6% of White-alone, non-Hispanic and about 7% of Black-alone, non-Hispanic school-age children.18
  • In 2021, approximately 12% of school-age Asian-alone and 12% of school-age Hispanic children spoke another language at home and had difficulty speaking English compared with about 1% of White-alone, non-Hispanic and 1% of Black-alone, non-Hispanic school-age children.19

table icon FAM5 HTML Table

17 Adult respondents were asked if the children in the household spoke a language other than English at home and how well they could speak English. Categories used for reporting how well children could speak English were "Very well," "Well," "Not well," and "Not at all." All those who were reported to speak English less than "Very well" were considered to have difficulty speaking English based on an evaluation of the English-speaking ability of a sample of children in the 1980s.

18 Federal surveys now give respondents the option of reporting more than one race. Therefore, two basic ways of defining a race group are possible. A group such as Black may be defined as those who reported Black and no other race (the race-alone or single-race concept) or those who reported Black regardless of whether they also reported another race (the race-alone or in-combination concept). This indicator shows data using the first approach (race-alone). Use of the single-race population does not imply that it is the preferred method of presenting or analyzing data. The U.S. Census Bureau uses a variety of approaches. Data on race and Hispanic origin are collected separately. Persons of Hispanic origin may be of any race. The percentages of Asian-alone, non-Hispanic; White-alone, non-Hispanic; and Black-alone, non-Hispanic school children who spoke a language other than English at home were statistically different from each other.

19 The percentages of Asian-alone, non-Hispanic and Hispanic children ages 5–17 who spoke English less than "Very well" were statistically different from the percentages of White-alone, non-Hispanic and Black-alone, non-Hispanic children ages 5–17 who spoke English less than "Very well." The percentages for the latter two groups were not statistically different from one another.