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By Sriharsha Devulapalli, Graphics Reporter Aug 24, 2024 - San Francisco Chronicle
California is home to one of the world’s largest South Asian diasporas, with nearly a million people — one in every five South Asians in the United States — calling the state home. And the number of South Asians has increased dramatically over the past decades.
That South Asian population is diverse, with people coming from a variety of different countries in the subcontinent and speaking many different languages. To better understand that diversity, the Chronicle examined U.S. census data on the languages spoken at home by California’s South Asian community across California.
We used data from the American Community Survey (ACS) collected from 2018 to 2022, and included languages that are most commonly spoken in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bhutan and the Maldives. The survey data captures the number of Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu speakers separately — all languages spoken by 50 million or more people around the world. The survey groups speakers of the Nepali, Marathi and Konkani languages together. It also clubs together Malayalam and Kannada.
The ACS provides this data at the level of a census area, officially known as a Public Use Microdata Area (PUMA), which are geographic areas of a state with approximately 100,000 people.
In terms of the overall number of speakers of any of these languages, the Bay Area stands out. The five census areas with the highest share of South Asian language speakers are all in Alameda and Santa Clara counties. The area with the very highest number is in Southeast Fremont, with 27% of people speaking a South Asian language at home.
These maps show where Hindi, Punjabi, Telugu and other South Asian languages are spoken in Californi
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