(Image source from: The Financial Express)
A study by an American think tank has found that the number of United States residents speaking Telugu rose by 86 percent between 2010 and 2017 thus making Telugu, a language spoken in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, the fastest growing language in the U.S.
According to a report by BBC, but Telugu, the fourth most spoken language in India, is still outside the top 20 of the most widely-spoken languages other than English in the U.S.
The online video by the World Economic Forum referred to a study by the U.S.-based Centre for Immigration, which analyzed census data to look at the pace at which languages were being spoken in America.
The study on languages spoken in the U.S. used data from the American Community Survey and compared the number of people who said they spoke a language apart from English at home in 2010 and 2017, the BBC said.
Earlier this year there were more than 400,000 Telugu speakers in the U.S. - virtually double the number in 2010. From among the top 10 fastest-growing languages in America, seven are from South Asia.
Related content: Telugu is U.S.'s Fastest Thriving Foreign Language: Study
The outgrowth of Telugu was connected to the links forged between Hyderabad and the U.S. engineering and technology industries, Prasad Kunisetty, founder of the Telugu People Foundation, a non-profit organization in the U.S., was quoted as saying.
The rapid growth of Information Technology in the mid-1990s led to a huge demand for software engineers, he said.
Many were recruited from Hyderabad, which sends students to the U.S. in ample numbers.
Down the years, Telugu-speaking Americans have continued to hire software engineers from Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, the BBC said.
Prominent U.S.-based Telugu speakers comprise the first Indian-American Miss America Nina Davuluri and the current Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella.
Of over 60 million people that speak a language apart from English out of the total population of nearly 320 million, an immense majority speak Spanish.
Out of the most usually spoken South Asian languages, Hindi is first, followed by Urdu, Gujarati and then Telugu.
-Sowmya Sangam
