Speak English "very well" - B16005C037 - Nativity By Language Spoken at Home By Ability to Speak English For the Population 5 Years and Over (American Indian and Alaska Native Alone) - American Community Survey Tables: 2006 (1-Year Estimates) (ACS06) - Survey ACS 2006 (1-Year Estimates)

Data Dictionary:

ACS 2006 (1-Year Estimates)

you are here: choose a survey survey data set table variable details

Survey: ACS 2006 (1-Year Estimates)

Data Source:

U.S. Census Bureau

Data set: American Community Survey Tables: 2006 (1-Year Estimates) (ACS06)

Table:

B16005C. Nativity By Language Spoken at Home By Ability to Speak English For the Population 5 Years and Over (American Indian and Alaska Native Alone) [45]

Universe: Universe: American Indian and Alaska Native alone population 5 years and Over

Variable Details

B16005C.	Nativity By Language Spoken at Home By Ability to Speak English For the Population 5 Years and Over (American Indian and Alaska Native Alone)
	Universe: Universe: American Indian and Alaska Native alone population 5 years and Over
	B16005C001Universe: American Indian and Alaska Native alone population 5 years and Over B16005C024 Foreign born B16005C036 Speak Asian or Pacific Island languages B16005C037 Speak English "very well" Percent base: American Indian and Alaska Native alone population 5 years and Over (ACS06:B16005C001) Aggregation method: Addition

Relevant Documentation:

Excerpt from:	Social Explorer; U.S. Census Bureau; American Community Survey 2006 Summary File: Technical Documentation.
	ACS 2006-1yr Summary File: Technical Documentation -> Appendix B. Subject Definitions -> Population Variables -> Nativity

Nativity

See "Place of Birth."

Excerpt from:	Social Explorer; U.S. Census Bureau; American Community Survey 2006 Summary File: Technical Documentation.
	ACS 2006-1yr Summary File: Technical Documentation -> Appendix B. Subject Definitions -> Population Variables -> Place of Birth -> Nativity

Nativity

Information on place of birth and citizenship status was used to classify the population into two major categories: native and foreign born.

Excerpt from:	Social Explorer; U.S. Census Bureau; American Community Survey 2006 Summary File: Technical Documentation.
	ACS 2006-1yr Summary File: Technical Documentation -> Appendix B. Subject Definitions -> Population Variables -> Language Spoken at Home and Ability to Speak English -> Language Spoken at Home

Language Spoken at Home

Data on language spoken at home were derived from answers to the 2006 American Community Survey Questions 13a and 13b. These questions were asked only of persons 5 years of age and older. Instructions mailed with the American Community Survey questionnaire instructed respondents to mark "Yes" on Question 13a if they sometimes or always spoke a language other than English at home, and "No" if a language was spoken only at school - or if speaking was limited to a few expressions or slang. For Question 13b, respondents printed the name of the non-English language they spoke at home. If the person spoke more than one non-English language, they reported the language spoken most often. If the language spoken most frequently could not be determined, the respondent reported the language learned first.
Questions 13a and 13b referred to languages spoken at home in an effort to measure the current use of languages other than English. This category excluded respondents who spoke a language other than English exclusively outside of the home.
Most respondents who reported speaking a language other than English also spoke English. The questions did not permit a determination of the primary language of persons who spoke both English and another language.
An automated computer system coded write-in responses to Question 13b into more than 380 detailed language categories. This automated procedure compared write-in responses with a master computer code list - which contained approximately 55,000 previously coded language names and variants - and then assigned a detailed language category to each write-in response. The computerized matching assured that identical alphabetic entries received the same code. Clerical coding categorized any write-in responses that did not match the computer dictionary. When multiple languages other than English were specified, only the first was coded.
The write-in responses represented the names people used for languages they spoke. They may not have matched the names or categories used by professional linguists. The categories used were sometimes geographic and sometimes linguistic. The following table provides an illustration of the content of the classification schemes used to present language data.
Four and Thirty-Nine Group Classifications of Languages Spoken at Home with Illustrative Examples

Four-Group Classification	Thirty-nine Group Classification	Examples
Spanish	Spanish or Spanish Creole	Spanish, Ladino, Pachuco
Other Indo-European languages	French	French, Cajun, Patois
	French Creole	Haitian Creole
	Italian	Italian
	Portuguese or Portuguese Creole	Portuguese, Papia Mentae
	German	German, Luxembourgian
	Yiddish	Yiddish
	Other West Germanic languages	Dutch, Pennsylvania Dutch, Afrikaans
	Scandinavian languages	Danish, Norwegian, Swedish
	Greek	Greek
	Russian	Russian
	Polish	Polish
	Serbo-Croatian	Serbo-Croatian, Croatian, Serbian
	Other Slavic languages	Czech, Slovak, Ukrainian
	Armenian	Armenian
	Persian	Persian
	Gujarathi	Gujarathi
	Hindi	Hindi
	Urdu	Urdu
	Other Indic languages	Bengali, Marathi, Punjabi, Romany
	Other Indo-European languages	Albanian, Gaelic, Lithuanian,Rumanian
Asian and Pacific Island languages	Chinese	Cantonese, Formosan, Mandarin
	Japanese	Japanese
	Korean	Korean
	Mon-Khmer, Cambodian	Mon-Khmer, Cambodian
	Hmong	Hmong
	Thai	Thai
	Laotian	Laotian
	Vietnamese	Vietnamese
	Other Asian languages	Dravidian languages (Malayalam, Telugu, Tamil),Turkish
	Tagalog	Tagalog
	Other Pacific Island languages	Chamorro, Hawaiian, Ilocano, Indonesian, Samoan
All other languages	Navajo	Navajo
	Other Native North American languages	Apache, Cherokee, Dakota, Pima, Yupik
	Hungarian	Hungarian
	Arabic	Arabic
	Hebrew	Hebrew
	African languages	Amharic, Ibo, Twi, Yoruba, Bantu, Swahili, Somali
	Other and unspecified languages	Syriac, Finnish, Other languages of the Americas, not reported

Excerpt from:	Social Explorer; U.S. Census Bureau; American Community Survey 2006 Summary File: Technical Documentation.
	ACS 2006-1yr Summary File: Technical Documentation -> Appendix B. Subject Definitions -> Population Variables -> Language Spoken at Home and Ability to Speak English -> Ability to Speak English

Ability to Speak English

Respondents who reported speaking a language other than English were asked to indicate their English-speaking ability based on one of the following categories: "Very well," "Well," "Not well," or "Not at all." Ideally, the data on ability to speak English represented a person's perception of their own English-speaking ability. However, because one household member usually completes American Community Survey questionnaires, the responses may have represented the perception of another household member. Respondents were not instructed on how to interpret the response categories in Question 13c.

Excerpt from:	Social Explorer; U.S. Census Bureau; American Community Survey 2006 Summary File: Technical Documentation.
	ACS 2006-1yr Summary File: Technical Documentation -> Appendix B. Subject Definitions -> Population Variables -> Age

Age

The data on age were derived from answers to Question 2. The age classification is based on the age of the person in complete years at the time of interview. Both age and date of birth are used in combination to calculate the most accurate age at the time of the interview. Inconsistently reported and missing values are assigned or imputed based on the values of other variables for that person, from other people in the household, or from people in other households ("hot deck" imputation). Data on age are used to determine the applicability of other questions for a particular individual and to classify other characteristics in tabulations. Age data are needed to interpret most social and economic characteristics used to plan and analyze programs and policies. Therefore, age data are tabulated by many different age groupings, such as 5-year age groups.

Median Age

The median age is the age that divides the population into two equal-size groups. Half of the population is older than the median age and half is younger. Median age is based on a standard distribution of the population by single years of age and is shown to the nearest tenth of a year. (See the sections on "Standard Distributions" and "Medians" under "Derived Measures.")

Age Dependency Ratio

The age dependency ratio is derived by dividing the combined under-18 and 65-and-over populations by the 18-to-64 population and multiplying by 100.

Old-Age Dependency Ratio

The old-age dependency ratio is derived by dividing the population 65 years and over by the 18-to-64 population and multiplying by 100.

Child Dependency Ratio

The child dependency ratio is derived by dividing the population under 18 years by the 18-to-64 population, and multiplying by 100.

Limitation of the Data

Caution should be taken when comparing population in age groups across time. The entire population continually ages into older age groups over time and babies fill in the youngest age group. Therefore, the population of a certain age is made up of a completely different group of people in 2000 and 2006. Since populations occasionally experience booms/increases and busts/decreases in births, deaths, or migration (for example, the postwar Baby Boom from 1946-1964), one should not necessarily expect that the population in an age group in Census 2000 should be similar in size or proportion to the population in the same age group in the 2006 ACS. For example, Baby Boomers were age 36 to 54 in Census 2000 while they were age 44 to 62 in the 2006 ACS. Therefore, the age group 55 to 59 would show a considerable increase in population when comparing Census 2000 data with the 2006 ACS data.
Beginning in 2006, the population in group quarters (GQ) is included in the ACS. Some types of GQ populations have age distributions that are very different from the household population. The inclusion of the GQ population could therefore have a noticeable impact on the age distribution. This is particularly true for areas with a substantial GQ population.

Question/Concept History

The 1996-2002 American Community Survey question asked for month, day, and year of birth before age. Since 2003, the American Community Survey question asked for age, followed by month, day, and year of birth. In 2006, an additional instruction was provided with the age and date of birth question on the American Community Survey questionnaire to report babies as age 0 when the child was less than 1 year old. The addition of this instruction occurred after 2005 National Census Test results indicated increased accuracy of age reporting for babies less than one year old.

Excerpt from:	Social Explorer; U.S. Census Bureau; American Community Survey 2006 Summary File: Technical Documentation.
	ACS 2006-1yr Summary File: Technical Documentation -> Appendix B. Subject Definitions -> Population Variables -> Race -> American Indian or Alaska Native

American Indian or Alaska Native

A person having origins in any of the original peoples of North and South America (including Central America) and who maintain tribal affiliation or community attachment. It includes people who classified themselves as described below.

American Indian

This category includes people who indicate their race as "American Indian," entered the name of an Indian tribe, or reported such entries as Canadian Indian, French American Indian, or Spanish American Indian.

American Indian Tribe

Respondents who identified themselves as American Indian were asked to report their enrolled or principal tribe. Therefore, tribal data in tabulations reflect the written entries reported on the questionnaires. Some of the entries (for example, Iroquois, Sioux, Colorado River, and Flathead) represent nations or reservations. The information on tribe is based on self-identification and therefore does not reflect any designation of a federally- or state-recognized tribe. The information for the American Community Survey is derived from the American Indian Tribal Classification List for the 1990 census that was updated for Census 2000 and the ACS based on a December 1997 Federal Register Notice entitled "Indian Entities Recognized and Eligible to Receive Service From the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs," Department of the Interior, Bureau of Indian Affairs, issued by the Office of Management and Budget.

Alaska Native

This category includes written responses of Eskimos, Aleuts, and Alaska Indians as well as entries such as Arctic Slope, Inupiat, Yupik, Alutiiq, Egegik, and Pribilovian. The Alaska tribes are the Alaskan Athabascan, Tlingit, and Haida. The information for ACS is based on the American Indian Tribal Classification List for the 1990 census and Census 2000, which was expanded to list the individual Alaska Native Villages when provided as a written response for race.