Half of US-born Indian-American children (51.7%) speak only English at home

Who speaks only English at home, US-born and foreign-born, by age

Asian Indian alone, aged 5 and older, in the US. The share is weighted to the population, and each share carries its 90% margin of error.

Records are the people in the Census sample. People is the weighted population they stand for. US-born people aged 65 and older are not in the table, because the sample is too small (see the limits below). The CSV has that row.

Which languages do the other children speak?

48.3% of US-born children aged 5 to 17 speak a language other than English at home. These are their languages, as a share of that group, rounded to whole percent.

1. Hindi22%
2. Telugu18%
3. Gujarati13%
4. Punjabi12%
5. Tamil11%
6. Bengali6%
7. Malayalam4%
8. Urdu4%

These eight cover 90% of the group. The rest speak other languages. The CSV gives the same list for US-born adults aged 18 to 34 and for foreign-born children and young adults.

What this number does not say

• Race alone, not ancestry. The group is people who gave Asian Indian as their only race. Pew Research Center counts Indians alone or in combination with another race or origin, and gives 28% for all ages 5 and older, from 2021 to 2023 data with no split by age or by US-born and foreign-born. The two numbers count different people, so they are not a trend.
• At home is not ability. The Census asks which language a person speaks at home. A child who speaks only English at home can still understand Hindi, Tamil or Punjabi.
• US-born and foreign-born are Census groups. US-born is the Census group “native”: people born in the US, in a US territory, or abroad to a US-citizen parent. All other people are foreign-born, so a child born in the UK, Canada, the Gulf or East Africa counts the same as a child born in India.
• A sample, with a margin of error. The microdata is a sample of the people who live in the US, in homes and in group quarters such as college dorms, so each share carries a 90% margin of error. US-born people aged 65 and older are not in the table: 161 records give ±7.9 points.

The second definition: Pew Research Center, Facts about Indians in the U.S. (1 May 2025).

Method

1. 01Data: the person records of the ACS 2024 1-year PUMS (csv_pus.zip, Census file of 4 December 2025).
2. 02Group: race code RAC2P 4015 (Asian Indian alone), age AGEP 5 and older.
3. 03Measure: LANX 2 (“No, speaks only English”). For a person who speaks another language at home, LANP gives the language.
4. 04Split: NATIVITY (1 native, which this page calls US-born, 2 foreign-born) by age 5 to 17, 18 to 34, 35 to 64, and 65 and older.
5. 05Weights: the person weight PWGTP. The standard error comes from the 80 replicate weights PWGTP1 to PWGTP80 with the Census formula, 4/80 times the sum of the squared differences. The margin of error is 1.645 times the standard error (90%).
6. 06Runs: the same script, three times on 14 October 2026 and one time on 17 October 2026, with the same result each time.

Source: US Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2024 1-year Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS). The variable codes are in the 2024 data dictionary. Anyone with the public file can count the same table.