Italian › Culture › Italian in America: Statistics
This page collects what the U.S. Census actually says about Italian America. Every figure is pulled from a named Census table and dated, and the charts are free to reproduce — there is a copy-paste embed under each one.
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1. The gap between ancestry and language
| Measure (2023) | People | Census table |
|---|---|---|
| Report Italian ancestry | 16,110,022 | B04006, ACS 1-year |
| Speak Italian at home | 525,930 | B16001, ACS 5-year |
| Were born in Italy | 305,199 | B05006, ACS 5-year |
In four years the number of Italian speakers fell from 569,865 in 2019 to 525,930 in 2023 — a drop of 7.7%.
Italian America is unusually concentrated. New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, California and Florida hold more than half of everyone who claims Italian ancestry, and New York alone accounts for roughly a quarter of every Italian speaker in the country. Where the community stayed dense, the language lasted longer.
2. How that compares with the other heritage languages
Set the three biggest European heritage groups in America side by side and a pattern appears: the larger the ancestry group, the smaller the share that still speaks the language.
| Language | Claim the ancestry | Speak it at home | Roughly |
|---|---|---|---|
| German | 40,502,214 | 860,992 | 1 in 47 |
| Italian | 16,110,022 | 525,930 | 1 in 31 |
| Polish | 8,243,708 | 514,558 | 1 in 16 |
3. Where the language survives — and where it did not
| State | Italian ancestry | Speak Italian at home | Speakers per 100 |
|---|---|---|---|
| New York | 2,206,289 | 129,840 | 5.88 |
| Connecticut | 562,177 | 23,801 | 4.23 |
| New Jersey | 1,297,857 | 53,741 | 4.14 |
| California | 1,346,407 | 53,710 | 3.99 |
| Florida | 1,250,302 | 46,121 | 3.69 |
| Illinois | 687,106 | 25,291 | 3.68 |
| Massachusetts | 791,491 | 26,278 | 3.32 |
| Pennsylvania | 1,392,648 | 30,424 | 2.18 |
| Wisconsin | 202,088 | 3,404 | 1.68 |
| Ohio | 684,977 | 11,329 | 1.65 |
Italian is disappearing faster than German. Between 2019 and 2023 the number of Italian speakers at home fell 7.7%, against 4.7% for German over the same four years. New York still leads at 5.88 speakers per 100 — the highest of any state for Italian — but Pennsylvania, with 1.4 million Italian-Americans, is down to 2.18, and Ohio to 1.65.
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Methodology and sources
Source: U.S. Census Bureau. Ancestry from the American Community Survey 1-year estimates 2023, table B04006. Language from ACS 5-year estimates 2023, table B16001. Place of birth from ACS 5-year 2023, table B05006. The speakers-per-100 ratio was calculated by us from B16001 and B04006 and is not a Census Bureau statistic. Retrieved from data.census.gov, August 2026.
Census Bureau output is a work of the U.S. federal government and is in the public domain. Ancestry figures use 1-year estimates; language and place-of-birth figures use 5-year estimates, which are more reliable for smaller populations. This page is updated when new ACS estimates are released.
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