Italian language in the United States
| Year | Speakers | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1910a | |||||||||
| 1920a | |||||||||
| 1930a | |||||||||
| 1940 | |||||||||
| 1960a | |||||||||
| 1970 | |||||||||
| 1980 | |||||||||
| 1990 | |||||||||
| 2000 | |||||||||
| 2010 | |||||||||
| 2020 | |||||||||
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^a Foreign-born population only | |||||||||
An important part of Italian American identity, the Italian language has been widely spoken in the United States of America for more than one hundred years, due to large-scale immigration beginning in the late 19th century. Since the 1980s, however, it has seen a steady decline in the number of speakers, as earlier generations of Italian Americans die out and the language is less often spoken at home by successive generations due to assimilation and integration into American society. From its peak as the fourth most spoken language in the United States in 1940 (behind English, Spanish, and German), by 2020 Italian had dropped to become the fifteenth most spoken language in the country.