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A woman listens to explanations on headphones about the Indian languages Hindi, left, and Marathi at the International Book Fair in Frankfurt, central Germany, Wednesday, Oct. 4, 2006. Indian literature, which already has a global following for its English writers, is reaching out to a broader audience for works in dozens of Indian languages at the Frankfurt Book Fair, which opened Tuesday. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)
WASHINGTON -- Hindi has emerged as the largest Indian language spoken in the US, with nearly 6.5 lakh people speaking it, according to the latest Census data.
The US Census Bureau based on American Community Survey data collected from 2009 to 2013, said that more than 60 million people in the US speak a language other than English at home, 25 million of whom speak English.
Top languages other than English spoken in US homes include Spanish (with more than 37.4 million speakers), Chinese (about 2.9 million), French (1.3 million), Korean (1.1 million), German (1.1 million), Vietnamese (1.4 million), Arabic (924,573), Tagalog (1.6 million) and Russian (879,434).
Hindi tops the list from India with nearly 6.5 lakh speakers.
Nearly 4 lakh US residents speak Urdu and Gujarati is spoken by more than 3.7 lakh people. Other than Hindi, all the major Indian languages are also spoken in the US.
While Bengali and Punjabi are spoken by more than 2.5 lakh people each, the Census bureau says Marathi is spoken by more than 73,000 people, Oriya (more than 5,000), Assamese (about 1300) and Kashmiri by about 1700 people in the US.
It has even listed Bihari as a language spoken by nearly 600 people and Rajasthani by about 700.
Nepali is spoken by more than 94,000 people and Sindhi by nearly 9,000.
Nearly 250,000 people speak Telugu while Tamil is spoken by about 190,000 people, Malayalam (about 146,000 people) and Kannada (about 48,000).
Tribal language Munda is spoken by more than 2,000 people and Tibetan by over 16,000.
The data released by Census Bureau yesterday represents the most comprehensive data on languages spoken in the US.
These are the most comprehensive data ever released from the Census Bureau on languages spoken less widely in the US, such as Pennsylvania Dutch, Ukrainian, Turkish, Romanian, Amharic and many others.
Also included are 150 different Native North American languages, collectively spoken by more than 350,000 people, including Yupik, Dakota, Apache, Keres and Cherokee.
"While most of the US population speaks only English at home or a handful of other languages like Spanish or Vietnamese, the American Community Survey released the wide-ranging language diversity of the US," said Erik Vickstrom, a Census Bureau statistician.
"For example, in the New York metro area alone, more than a third of the population speaks a language other than English at home, and close to 200 different languages are spoken.
Knowing the number of languages and how many speak these languages in a particular area provides valuable information to policymakers, planners and researchers," he said.
This word originally described a specific group of thieves in India and was only used on the subcontinent. It caught on in England in the 19th century, though, when Victorian novels about murderous Indian thugs became bestsellers. From there the word came to describe a criminal more generally. But the British stories about these original Indian 'thugs' were riddled with factual errors, and The Thing About Thugs delves into some of these.
(02 of07)
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The next time you work up a lather in the bath, think of a traditional Indian barber doing a "champa" (Hindustani): the act of "pressing" your hair and head with a mixture of oils and perfumes. That's where "shampoo" comes from. Deen Mohammad, an Indian entrepreneur who joined the East India Company at the age of 12 in the mid-18th century, and later migrated to Ireland and then London, is credited with introducing 'shampoo' to the west. His bath house, which he started after his Indian restaurant flopped in London, became hugely popular and was patronized by British royalty. The man, like some of the Indian characters in the 1830s London of The Thing About Thugs, obviously knew how to sell himself.
(03 of07)
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This is a word that started on the humid Eastern coast of India - as "bangla" ("belonging to Bengal"). Originally it meant a small one storied house or hovel, probably used by European sailors in India. It seems to have taken on a more exotic connotation the farther it got from India -- think of the mid-war fad for the exotic "California Bungalow" in Australia.
(04 of07)
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This word refers to a learned high-caste Hindu, and it goes back to the classical Indian language, Sanskrit. In English today, we tend to use the word in an ironic or even derogatory manner, for instance when we refer to "financial pundits." This is not a totally new development, as not everyone loved pundits in India either. The popular medieval poet, Kabir, for instance, largely scoffed at pundits' claims of learning. In one of his poems Kabir says that the reading of thick books does not make a pundit of anyone; instead he who can read the letters in the word "love" knows as much as he needs to know.
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Sailing for London at the end of the 18th century, another Indian, Mirza Abu Taleb, was teased by European sailors for sleeping "fully dressed." The Europeans themselves slept in underpants. In a travel book he wrote on returning to India in 1803, Abu Taleb notes that he told the sailors that, in case the ship sank at night, he would be able to get off it much faster than them. One can understand how the word "pajamas" - still used for loose traditional trousers in the East - must have crept into English, and come to stand for loose trousers and a jacket to "sleep in."
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This word surprised me when I first discovered its origins: I knew it was a highly colorful kerchief (itself from the French, couvre-chef, "cover the head") worn mostly by Americans and hence I thought it probably had Latin or Native American roots. But it turned out to be derived from a word I grew up using almost daily in Hindi: "bandhana" (to tie up). It probably travelled into English by way of Portuguese and South Asian sailors (lascars), who worked on European ships in the 18th and 19th centuries. Some of these lascars have a role to play in The Thing About Thugs too. But in Hindi, 'bandhana' did not have any criminal connotations: that is something it assumed only much later, when members of American gangs wore them in the 1980s and 1990s.
(07 of07)
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Deriving from ancient Sanskrit, but common to a number of Indian (including Hindi and Urdu) and Asian languages (including Persian), "jungle" meant "forest, wasteland, uncultivated land." Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book (1894) helped broaden the use of the word. In 1906, with the publication of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, which exposed the horrid conditions of the US meat-packing industry, "jungle" also came to mean "a lawless and violent place." Its most recent dictionary meaning, as in "jungle music" (a type of fast dance music with an exaggerated bass line, influenced by reggae and soul), is a vital American development of an old Indian word.
-- This article exists as part of the online archive for HuffPost India, which
closed in 2020. Some features are no longer enabled. If you have questions
or concerns about this article, please contact
indiasupport@huffpost.com.