New Hampshire is pretty homogeneous but it’s not completely a bunch of English-speaking white folks. The New Hampshire Center for Justice and Equity summarized our bilingual status:
- Roughly 8% of the state’s population (roughly 103,500 people) speak a language other than English in homes;
- Spanish is the most commonly-spoken language other than English, almost 3% of the total state population and 35% of the population who speak languages other than English (more than 36,000 people);
- 2016-2021 saw a slight decrease of French speakers and a slight increase of Spanish speakers; and
- Across age and language categories, more than 60% – and in some cases up to 76% – of non-English speakers also speak English “very well”
You can read the whole report here.
Return to the Concord Monitor
David,
The other statistic worth adding into this line of thought is the number of languages spoken in NH. I understand that 80 languages are spoken in the homes of Manchester students …. a number of NH locations are identified as refugee cities, accepting refugees from around the world and with them their native languages. Obviously most of these refugees have family members who quickly adopt a level of English to get buy, get work and so forth. But they also bring a rich diversity of cultural components into our cities, with local groceries, restaurants, etc .
[Check my numbers, as things change over time … but the refugee support organizations have a pretty good handle on these.]
[I notice that the full report you reference has many “buckets” for variations on “other” so that Serbian and Croatian for example end up in the same one .. which misses a key aspect of language variation.]
There is no excuse for the fact that NH students don’t graduate from HS with at least two of the big three (English, Spanish and French). This failure is not excusable. The fact that schools continue to try to teach language structure vs conversational speech eliminates most students from any interest. They don’t need to know how to read the language (that comes later) they only need to be able to understand their peers.