Editing Language Spoken at Home (section)

{{Short description|Data set published by the United States Census Bureau on languages in the United States}}
'''Language Spoken at Home''' is a [[data set]] published by the [[United States Census Bureau]] on [[languages in the United States]]. It is based on a three-part language question asked about all household members who are five years old or older. The first part asks if the person speaks a language other than English at home. If the answer is "yes", the respondent is asked what that language is. The third part of the question asks how well the person speaks English ("Very well", "Well", "not well", "Not at all").

The three-part question was first asked in 1980; It replaced a question about mother tongue. In 2000, the language question appeared on the long-form questionnaire which was distributed to 1 out of 6 households. After the long form census was eliminated (after the 2000 census), the language question was moved to the [[American Community Survey]] (ACS). The language questions used by the US Census changed numerous times during 20th century.<ref name="Stevens1999">{{cite journal |doi=10.2307/2648061 |last=Stevens |first=Gillian |year=1999 |title=A Century of US Censuses and the Language Characteristics of Immigrants |journal=Demography |volume=36 |issue=3 |pages=387–397|jstor=2648061 |pmid=10472502 }}</ref> Changes in the language questions are tied to the changing ideologies of language in addition to changing language policies.<ref name="Leeman2018">{{cite journal |doi=10.1515/ijsl-2018-0013 |last=Leeman |first=Jennifer |year=2018 |title=It's All about English: The Interplay of Monolingual Ideologies, Language Policies and the U.S. Census Bureau's Statistics on Multilingualism |journal=International Journal of the Sociology of Language |issue=252 |pages=21–43}}</ref>