By Suzannah Gonzales, Eunice Moscoso, AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Statesman.com: Spanish tops the list of languages other than English spoken in the Austin area, followed by Asian languages like Vietnamese and Korean. But Urdu also can be heard in Austin, along with Dutch in Round Rock and Russian in Hays County.
It's a language smorgasbord prevalent throughout the state and the country.
About 6 million Texans older than age 5 spoke a language other than English in 2000, and of those, about 2.7 million spoke English less than "very well," the Census Bureau reported Tuesday.
In 14 million U.S. households, people speak a language other than English. Of those households, 3 million are "linguistically isolated," where all members 14 years and older have at least some difficulty with English, the report found.
The Census Bureau's national data, which were based on information from the 2000 census, also showed that about one in five people over the age of 5 spoke a language other than English that year and that about one in eight spoke English less than "very well."
The data included new details about foreign language speakers in each state, including income and education levels that show the difficulty non-English speakers may face in finding good paying jobs.
"I definitely feel that bilingual education is important," said Cook Elementary School teacher Brooke Holland, who speaks both English and Spanish in the classroom. "As a fifth-grade teacher, it's important for (students) to gain the skills in English to be successful in middle school."
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