Recent studies shows that the Filipino language “Tagalog” is considered as the third most widely spoken foreign language in the United States households, following only two of the world’s most popular foreign language, Spanish and Chinese.
Based upon the 2013 American Community Survey (ACS) conducted by the US Census Bureau found that there were approximately 1.6 million speakers of Filipino, putting the Philippine language behind Spanish with 38.4 million speakers and Chinese with 3 million native speakers in the US.
According to the recent study in the United States, the Tagalog language is defined as “the national language of the Philippines.” Aside from Tagalog, other languages that made it to the Top Five Foreign language were Vietnamese (1.4 million) and French with 1.3 million speakers.
The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) in the United States noted that the number of people speaking a foreign language in their home has reached an all-time high of 618 million, higher by 2.2 million since the year 2010.
The highest percentage of foreign-language speakers according to the CIS are located in California with 45 percent, followed by New Mexico with 36 percent and Texas with 35 percent.
Meanwhile, based upon the Philippines’ record particularly the Commission on Filipinos Overseas (CFO) on their December 2012 report, there were nearly 3.5 million Filipinos in the United States of America.
