Telugu is the third-most common language spoken in the US
According to the 2012-2016 American Community Survey by US Census Bureau, data release from the last five years estimates that 3,21,695 people over the age of five speak Telugu at home in the United States of America. Tamil also made it to this list, with 2,38,699 people speaking Tamil at home.
Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft and Shantanu Narayen, CEO Adobe are from Hyderabad, where Telugu is the native language. Google CEO Sundar Pichai and other notable NRIs like actor Aziz Ansari hail from Chennai where Tamil is the primary language.
According to a report by Times Now News, Hindi tops the list followed by Gujarati while Telugu beats Bengali and Tamil speakers in the US. According to the Census Bureau, Tamil speakers were more evenly distributed across many parts of the country than the Telugu speakers. A majority of the Telugu-speaking families live in states like Illinois, New York, Washington, Oregon, California, and Pennsylvania.
According to The News Minute, the release said,
"For both languages, the highest concentration of speakers lived in California, followed by Texas and New Jersey (the number of persons who spoke Tamil in Texas and New Jersey are not statistically different)."
Before this feat, Telugu came under the category of spoken languages in 'Other Indic languages' or 'Other Asian languages'. For the first time ever, Telugu-speaking people were counted specifically. With Telugu and Hindi on the list of top 10 languages spoken in the states, Hindi tops it with more than 7.4 lakh speakers.
The World Telugu Conference is currently underway in Hyderabad. The five-day event aims at popularising Telugu as a language. According to a Livemint report, More than 6,000 delegates have registered to attend the conference and every day 20,000 to 25,000 people are expected to attend the programmes, which are being held at six venues across the city.
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