Percentage Of Americans Who Speak Spanish At Home? It's More Than You Think And Not Just Hispanics

An analysis of a 2011 survey of American households by the Pew Research Center finds that Spanish is the non-English language of choice for most Americans, whether it's spoken as a native tongue or learned as a foreign language. Some 37.6 million Americans, ages 5 and older, speak Spanish at home in the United States, more than ever before. The overwhelming majority of that number, the Pew Center found, is Hispanic. But not everyone: some 2.8 million non-Hispanics speak Spanish at home today, putting it at the top of the list of non-English languages spoken by non-Hispanics.

So who are those 2.8 million non-Hispanics who speak Spanish at home? The Pew Center says 59 percent of them trace their ancestry to countries in Europe that aren't Spain, like Germany, Ireland, England and Italy, and 77 percent of them consider themselves white. Another 12 percent are African-American (and 14 percent of them are black). A little less than one in five (18 percent) trace their heritage back to a Spanish-speaking country; 89 percent of these non-Hispanic Spanish speakers were born in the United States.

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One reason for their relatively frequent use of Spanish at home -- compared to the rest of their non-Hispanic peers -- might have to do with who else is at home. Many of them live in a household where at least one other member is Hispanic: overall, a little over a quarter, or 26 percent. About three in ten, or 28 percent, of non-Hispanic Spanish speakers who are married live with a Hispanic spouse.

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But compared to the non-Hispanic US population at large, this group of non-Hispanics is slightly less likely to speak English with a high degree of fluency. 80 percent of them say they speak English "very well", 11 percent say they speak it "well", and 9 percent say they speak it "not well" or not at all. That's compared to 96 percent of all non-Hispanics 5 years old and up who only speak English or who speak it "very well", 2 percent who speak it "well" and 2 percent who don't speak it well or not at all.

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Spanish is far and away the most commonly spoken non-English language in the United States. The 37.6 million Americans who speak it are more than the combined number of speakers of the next five most common languages -- Chinese (2.8 million); Hindi, Urdu or other Indic languages (2.2 million), French or French Creole (2.1 million) and Tagalog (1.7 million).