Hispanics are now the largest US minority group

According to the 2000 census, 47 million people over the age of five - nearly a sixth of the US population - do not speak English with their families.

This is an increase of 15 million people since 1990.

The changes reflect the surge in immigration into the US since 1990, an influx which has made Hispanics the largest minority group.

California led the states where people spoke a language other than English at home, followed by New Mexico and Texas.

The west and south of the US had about three times the number of Spanish speakers (21 million) as the north-east and Midwest (7 million).

Linguistic isolation

There has also been a sharp rise in the number of Americans regarded as "linguistically isolated" because of their limited English.

US LANGUAGES (excluding English) Spanish: 28,101,052 Chinese: 2,022,143 French: 1,643,838 German: 1,382,613 Tagalog (Philippines): 1,224,241 Vietnamese: 1,009,627 Italian: 1,008,370 Korean: 894,063 Russian: 706,242 Polish: 667,414 Arabic: 614,582 Portuguese: 564,630 Japanese: 477,997 French Creole: 453,368 Greek: 365,436 Hindi: 317,057 Persian: 312,085 Urdu: 262,900 Gujarathi: 235,988 Armenian: 202,708

Nearly 12 million people live in households where no adult speaks English well enough to communicate easily in shops, or with doctors or police.

But the report, entitled Language Use and English-Speaking Ability: 2000, said 55% of the people who spoke a language other than English at home said they spoke English "very well".

The largest proportional increase in the 1990s was Russian, the report says, with speakers nearly trebling, from 242,000 to 706,000.

The second largest increase was among French Creole speakers (including Haitian Creoles), whose numbers more than doubled, from 188,000 to 453,000.