What’s the Fastest-Growing Language in the U.S.? You’ll Never Guess

Few would guess correctly if asked which foreign language has the fastest-growing population of speakers in the United States. It is (so Quartz India reported this week) Telugu, a Dravidian language of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana states. In 2000, the U.S. had less than 88,000 speakers of Telugu; by last year it was more than 415,000.

India is divided roughly across the middle by a boundary between the Indic languages of the north (like Hindustani, which I wrote about recently) and the unrelated Dravidian languages of the south. It’s a very interesting boundary for linguists. Most of the vocabulary is radically different between the two language families, as different as German and Hungarian, but the syntax of the two language families, especially near the boundary, is remarkably similar. Indic languages like Marathi tend to have clause structure exactly like that of Kannada, the Dravidian language on the other side of the linguistic borderline.

The phonology is even more remarkably similar. Hardly any language families in the world typically have an array of stop consonants like this:

The funny-shaped t’s and d’s in the third column (these are International Phonetic Alphabet characters) are retroflex sounds, produced with the tongue tip curled back slightly; the sounds tʃ and dʒ are (roughly) the consonants of each and edge; and the sounds in the fourth row are murmured, with a breathy aftermath. The Indic languages all have roughly this array of sounds, and the Dravidian languages do too. It seems to be due to admixture through language contact, not through common linguistic origin.

There’s actually just one other major group of languages with retroflex consonants: many of the Australian Aboriginal languages. You may immediately be thinking, could that be a sign of where the Aborigines came from? Well, yes and no. There does seem to have been an influx of Dravidians into northern Australia, probably Tamils traveling by boat, about 4,000 years ago: About 11 percent of today’s Aborigines seem to have some Dravidian DNA. But four millennia ago is far too recent to account for most of the Australian Aboriginal population. They have been there for more like 50,000 or even 60,000 years, and they would have come ultimately from East Africa, like all the rest of the world’s human population, possibly on foot, via land bridges (that’s controversial). The structure of a stop-consonant system (which can change in a couple of millennia) cannot justify an assumption of kinship. Positing an Australian-Dravidian superfamily would be just fantasy.

The Telugu speakers settling in the U.S. are almost always Hindus, not Muslims. Many are high-tech experts. The way Indians have become the backbone of America’s computer industry is a cultural and educational oddity about India and its relations with the U.S. (especially California). It has been an enormous stroke of good fortune for American companies. Right up to the top: the chief executive of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, is a Telugu speaker from Telangana.

Not every American has been grateful. Srinivas Kuchibhotla was also a Telugu speaker from Telangana working in high tech, and on February 22, 2017, a man named Adam Purinton in Olathe, Kan., flew into a rage at him and another Indian man. Assuming they were Iranian Muslims, he told them to “get out of my country,” and shot them both, killing Kuchibhotla. (A white American, Ian Grillot, came to their aid and got shot himself while trying to chase Purinton down. Kansas has selfless heroes as well as hate-filled ignorant nutcases.)

Afterword: I should mention that while reading the Quartz article’s mention of the shooting of Kuchibhotla I came upon a sentence in that brought me up short grammatically:

Just a couple of weeks ago (in this Lingua Franca post, September 5) I called this sort of sentence ungrammatical. Slew is a typical number-transparent noun, like lot, number, and couple. I’m always on the lookout for evidence that some descriptive generalization of mine is wrong, but here I think the the writer of the piece, Ananya Bhattacharya, erred. (Bhattacharya is a Bengali name; Ananya is probably a bilingual Bengali and English speaker.) The head noun is slew, and it’s singular, but this is one of those cases where the number agreement is determined by the noun in the of-phrase that follows. Standard English would be A slew of Telugu workers in the US have been shot dead in various incidents. I’m not being bossy about this; I’m just saying what I think is closer to normal standard English usage. The singular has should be regarded as a slip — possibly a hypercorrection.