ABSTRACT
More than 39 million Latinos in the United States speak Spanish. If U.S. Spanish-speaking Latinos were a country, it would be the world's fourth most populous nation of Spanish speakers behind Mexico, Spain, and Argentina. There have been major changes in the dynamics associated with language transformations of Latinos over the last two decades. While Latinos speaking English at home more than doubled between 2000 and 2019, they account for only 29% of the overall Latino population. Within the Latino Spanish-speaking population, however, the trend shows that the number of bilingual persons (those who speak Spanish at home and speak English “well” or “very well”) has grown four times more rapidly over the last two decades compared to persons with limited or no English proficiency (those who speak Spanish at home and speak English “not well” or “not at all”). Thus, the majority of the overall Latino population is bilingual, accounting for 55% of all Latinos. Yet, there are a series of factors that are associated with variations in language patterns. This book chapter uses data from the American Community Survey public-use files to provide a description of trends in Spanish-language use among Latinos over five time periods (1980, 1990, 2000, 2010, and 2019). The analysis also examines the relationship between Spanish-language use and geographic and individual characteristics for the latest period (2019). Finally, results from multivariate analysis show that there are workforce penalties associated with being bilingual and Spanish-dominant speakers within the Latino population and for being Latino across linguistic categories relative to whites. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the policy implications of the research findings.
