WASHINGTON — The number of Russian speakers in the United States has quadrupled over the last 30 years, according to a U.S. Census Bureau report.
The report — titled Language Use in the United States: 2011 — indicates that the number of people speaking Russian in their homes surged from 173, 226 to 854,955 over the three decades between 1980 and 2010, an increase of 393.5 percent.
By 2011 the number of Russian speakers in the United States was even higher at 905,843, the report said.
The percentage change is outmatched only by Vietnamese, which rose by 599.2 percent during the 1980-2010 period, according to the report which was published Tuesday.
Although Russian is booming, Spanish is by far the most common language other than English spoken at home.
According to the census report, 37.5 million people in the United States spoke Spanish or Spanish Creole at home in 2011, up from approximately 11 million in 1980, the U.S. Census Bureau found.
Chinese was the next most widely spoken non-English language, with almost 2.9 million speakers in 2011, it said.
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