The table compares the number of high school students who speak ten different langauges at home in one US school district in 2008 and 2014.
Overall, Spanish was by far the most widely spoken home language in both years and saw the largest increase, whereas most other languages recorded far smaller numbers, with mixed trends of growth and decline.
Spanish speakers rose dramatically, from 15,110 in 2008 to 28,816 in 2014, almost doubling and remaining well ahead of every other language throughout the period. Chinese and Russian also increased significantly, more than doubling from 1,875 to 4,679 and from 414 to 1,656, respectively, while Arabic nearly tripled, climbing from 430 to 1,302. Similarly, there was a comparable rise among Nepalese and Tagalog speakers, whose numbers reached 439 and 512.
By contrast, Korean and Vietnamese were the only languages to decline over the period, falling from 3,029 to 2,735 and from 2,557 to 1,467 students, respectively. Meanwhile, Polish remained the smallest group throughout the period, its numbers dropping marginally from 110 to 82 speakers. Hindi, by comparison, barely changed, rising only from 375 to 430.