US hospitals are generally considered the best in the world and they are generally undertaking cutting-edge research that draws the best brains from around the world to them. But what has happened in recent years, is nothing short of amazing! It is reported that the Hindi language is now the second most widely spoken non-English language after Spanish among American physicians. A study has found Hindi to be among the top 10 non-English languages spoken by multilingual physicians nationally. It is spoken by 13.8% of multilingual American physicians, with 36.2% speaking Spanish.
The study was conducted by Doximity – an online social networking service for US clinicians. It released a first-of-its-kind research study, entitled “Language Barriers in US Health Care”. It analysed the languages – other than English – US physicians report speaking nationally, and across the largest 50 metropolitan areas in the country. The report has been drawn from a physician sample size of more than 60,000 respondents. The other languages that made the top-five were French with 8.8%, Persian/Farsi with 7.6% and Chinese with 5.2%, as per the data.
Top 10 non-English languages spoken by multilingual physicians nationally:
Spanish 36.2%
Hindi 13.8%
French 8.8%
Persian/Farsi 7.6%
Chinese 5.2%
Arabic 4.1%
German 3.7%
Russian 3.0%
Italian 2.7%
Hebrew 1.9%
Earlier, according to the American Community Survey 2016, Hindi was found as the most spoken Indian language in the United States, followed by Urdu, Gujarati and Telugu. The survey found that 810,877 people speak Hindi at home, which is double the number of Gujarati speakers (407,520). Hindi is the 11th most popular foreign language in US. While Urdu had more speakers than Gujarati, with 424,482 people conversing in the language, but it includes people from Pakistan as well. Telugu was the fourth most popular Indian language in the United States, with 365,566 people aged over five years speaking it at home. Nearly 3.6 million people in the United States speak Indic and Dravidian languages.