Did you know Telugu has become fastest growing foreign language in US?

Washington, Sep 29: While Spanish may be the most widely spoken language in the United States, Telugu, Bengali and Tamil have all shown rampant growth over the past seven years.

A report by the Centre of Immigration Studies highlights how nearly half of the residents of the five biggest cities of the United States speak a language other than English at home. And, the fastest growth has been recorded by Telugu with an 86% increase between the years of 2010 to 2017.

Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi came in 5th, 6th and 7th with Gujarati coming in 9th.

Quartz India notes that the south Indian city of Hyderabad sent the largest number of engineers to the US. Between 2008 and 2012, it sent over 26,000 students to the US, most of whom were pursuing degrees in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) fields.

Back in 2000, the US was home to just 87,543 Telugu speakers-the language is native to the southern Indian states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, which were a single entity until 2014. By 2010, there were 222,977. According to the latest figures, there are 415,414 of them, CIS found when looking at Census Bureau population data as of July 01, 2017.

And while Telegu may be the fastest growing foreign language, Hindi is the still most commonly spoken language of Indian-origin with 863,077 people.