Press & Data

Last updated August 2026 · My Everyday Language · data: U.S. Census Bureau

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Who we are, in one line you can paste

My Everyday Language teaches Polish, German and Italian to English speakers, with a native voice on every word. It grew out of Everyday Polish, a Facebook community of more than 120,000 people, and publishes original analysis of U.S. Census data on heritage-language decline.

What you may do with our data

  • Reproduce any figure in an article, broadcast, newsletter, report or presentation, commercial or not.
  • Reproduce any chart as published. Each chart on the statistics pages has a copy-paste embed block underneath it that carries the credit automatically.
  • Re-cut the numbers into your own chart or table.
  • Quote the findings as written, or paraphrase them.

The one condition is attribution: a live, followable link to the source page — the statistics page for that language, not our homepage. In print, where a link is not possible, myeverydaylanguage.com is enough.

Where the numbers come from

Everything is drawn from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. We publish the table number and vintage beside every figure so you can check it yourself, and we do not adjust or model anything.

Table What it measures Vintage we use
B04006 People reporting a given ancestry ACS 1-year estimates
B16001 Language spoken at home, population 5 years and over ACS 5-year estimates
B05006 Place of birth for the foreign-born population ACS 5-year estimates

How the rate is calculated. The “rate” column in every state table is speakers divided by ancestry — that is, of the people in a state who report a given ancestry, the share who still speak the language at home. Ancestry comes from the 1-year file and language from the 5-year file, because the 1-year file does not publish language at state level for smaller groups. Mixing vintages is the standard approach for this comparison, and it is why we describe these as rates rather than exact proportions of a single population.

What the figures cannot tell you. “Speaks at home” is self-reported and includes anyone who uses the language at home at all, at any level of fluency. It is not a measure of fluency, and it undercounts people who speak a heritage language outside the home — at church, at a club, with grandparents. We are careful to describe it as we found it.

When it updates. When the Census Bureau releases new ACS estimates. We restate the figures rather than quietly overwriting them, so a piece that cited an older number stays checkable.

The three datasets

Polish

The finding: In Illinois, one in five people of Polish descent still speaks Polish at home. In Wisconsin, it is one in seventy-nine.
  • Report Polish ancestry: 8,243,708 (B04006, ACS 1-year)
  • Speak Polish at home: 514,558 (B16001, ACS 5-year)
  • Were born in Poland: 402,060 (B05006, ACS 5-year)
State Ancestry Speak at home Rate
Illinois 789,582 166,889 21.1%
New Jersey 445,431 60,905 13.7%
New York 806,476 76,504 9.5%
Pennsylvania 719,382 16,468 2.3%
Michigan 744,210 16,661 2.2%
Wisconsin 462,215 5,876 1.3%

Download the Polish figures as CSV · full page, with charts and embed codes

German

The finding: German is the most-claimed ancestry in America — 40.5 million people, more than Irish or English — and only one in forty-seven still speaks it. The states with the most German-Americans have the least German left.
  • Report German ancestry: 40,502,214 (B04006, ACS 1-year)
  • Speak German at home: 860,992 (B16001, ACS 5-year)
  • Were born in Germany: 533,419 (B05006, ACS 5-year)
State Ancestry Speak at home Rate
Massachusetts 384,315 16,921 4.4%
California 2,686,525 92,993 3.46%
Texas 2,466,166 64,355 2.61%
Ohio 2,641,479 38,893 1.47%
Wisconsin 2,143,886 27,851 1.3%
Pennsylvania 2,822,540 36,199 1.28%
Minnesota 1,695,142 17,362 1.02%

Download the German figures as CSV · full page, with charts and embed codes

Italian

The finding: New York State alone accounts for roughly a quarter of all the Italian spoken in the United States.
  • 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)
State Ancestry Speak at home Rate
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%
Massachusetts 791,491 26,278 3.32%
Pennsylvania 1,392,648 30,424 2.18%
Ohio 684,977 11,329 1.65%

Download the Italian figures as CSV · full page, with charts and embed codes

If you need something else

We are glad to cut the data a different way — a single state, a metro area, a different year, a chart in your own house style. That is usually a same-day job and we do not charge for it.

We can also comment on the record on heritage-language decline in the United States, why the second and third generation stop speaking the language, and what families do to hold on to it.

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