News
The statement
"The U.S. Census believes that by 2030 the majority of Americans will use Spanish as their first language."
Fox's "Glee," Feb. 7, 2012, during a TV episode
The ruling
Sorry, Gleeks! Ricky Martin had it wrong last week.
During an episode of the popular show, Martin's character said that Spanish will become the primary language of the United States by 2030, according to information from the U.S. Census Bureau.
The comment, like the show, is fiction.
"We don't do projections of language spoken," on a regular official basis, said Robert Bernstein, a census spokesman. "That's very strange someone would cite us."
We did stumble on a couple of experts at the Census Bureau who took a stab at language projections and presented a paper at the Federal Forecasters Conference in April 2011. Their paper projects that somewhere between 13 and 15.3 percent of the age 5 and older population will speak Spanish by 2020 — the last year cited in the paper.
The authors of the paper, census demographer Jennifer Ortman and survey statistician Hyon Shin, told us that even if they projected out to 2030, the percentage of Spanish speakers likely would have continued to grow slightly — but nowhere close to a majority of Americans speaking Spanish as their first language.
"That is just blatantly wrong," the two agreed. "We don't have anything that can support that."
The Census Bureau predicts that in 2030 about 23 percent of the U.S. population will be Hispanic — but they note that not all of those people will speak Spanish as their first language.
Ricky Martin may have looked good singing in his tight pants, but we're going to light the show's pants on fire anyway. Pants on Fire!
This ruling has been edited for print. Read the full version at PolitiFact.com/Florida.
Loading...
