9.11 Languages and nationalities
To give you a sense of the diversity of twenty-first century North Carolina, we’ve provided two lists of languages below.
- The first is from the U.S. Census of 2000, and it shows the number of people aged 5 and over who spoke various languages at home — that is, as a first or native language.
- The second is from the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction; this table shows the number of students in North Carolina schools who spoke various languages at home in 2005.
Finally, for a historical perspective, we’ve provided similar data from antebellum North Carolina.
Census data
| Language | Number of speakers |
|---|---|
| 5 years and over | 7513165 |
| Speak only English | 6909648 |
| Speak other language | 603517 |
| Spanish or Spanish Creole | 378942 |
| Other Indo-European languages | 119961 |
| French (incl.Patois, Cajun) | 33201 |
| French Creole | 1441 |
| Italian | 6233 |
| Portuguese or Portuguese Creole | 3171 |
| German | 28520 |
| Yiddish | 467 |
| Other West Germanic languages | 2541 |
| Scandinavian languages | 2766 |
| Greek | 6404 |
| Russian | 4109 |
| Polish | 2965 |
| Serbo-Croatian | 1918 |
| Other Slavic languages | 2639 |
| Armenian | 117 |
| Persian | 2432 |
| Gujarathi | 5725 |
| Hindi | 4153 |
| Urdu | 3208 |
| Other Indic languages | 4834 |
| Other Indo-European languages | 2117 |
| Asian and Pacific Island languages | 78246 |
| Chines | 15698 |
| Japanese | 6317 |
| Korean | 11386 |
| Mon-Khmer, Cambodian | 3361 |
| Miao, Hmong | 7493 |
| Thai | 2019 |
| Laotian | 4599 |
| Vietnamese | 13594 |
| Other Asian languages | 5178 |
| Tagalog | 6521 |
| Other Pacific Island languages | 2080 |
| Other languages | 26368 |
| Navajo | 221 |
| Other Native North American languages | 2093 |
| Hungarian | 1041 |
| Arabic | 10834 |
| Hebrew | 1321 |
| African languages | 9181 |
| Other and unspecified languages | 1677 |
Data from NCDPI
This table, based on 2005 data from the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, lists every language spoken at home by a student in North Carolina public schools, with the number of speakers at each grade level.
A historical comparison
For some perspective, compare the lists above to this list of countries of origin of people living in North Carolina in 1850. (You may remember it from our look at antebellum migration.)
Foreign-born people living in North Carolina and in the United States, by country of origin, 1850
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Credits
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North Carolina History: A Sampler: Credits and acknowledgments
