In households where one or more persons (age 5 years old or over) speak a language other than English, the household language assigned to all household members is the non-English language spoken by the first person with a non-English language in the following order:

householder, spouse, parent, sibling, child, grandchild, other relative, stepchild, unmarried partner, housemate or roommate, roomer, boarder, or foster child, or other nonrelative. Thus, persons who speak only English may have a non-English household language assigned to them in tabulations of persons by household language.

Figure 1. Four- and Twenty-Five-Group Classifications of 1990 Census Languages Spoken at Home with Illustrative Examples
Four-Group Classification	Twenty-Five-Group Classification	Examples
Spanish Other Indo-European	Spanish	Spanish, Ladino
	French	French, Cajun,French Creole
	Italian
	Portuguese
	German
	Yiddish
	Other West	Afrikaans, Dutch,
	Germanic	Pennsylvania Dutch
	Scandanavian	Danish, Norwegian, Swedish
	Polish
	Russian
	South Slavic	Serbocroatian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Slovene
	Other Slavic	Czech, Slovak, Ukranian
	Greek
	Indic	Hindi, Bengali, Gujarathi, Punjabi, Romany, Sinhalese
	Other Indo European,	Armenian, Gaelic,
	not elsewhere classified	Lithuanian, Persian
Languages of Asia and the Pacific	Chinese
	Japanese
	Mon-Khmer	Cambodian
	Tagalog
	Korean
	Vietnamese
	Other languages	Chamorro, Dravidian
	(part)	Languages, Hawaiian,
		Ilocano, Thai, Turkish
All other languages	Arabic
	Hungarian
	Native North
	American languages
	Other languages	Amharic, Syriac,
	(part)	Finnish, Hebrew,
		Languages of
		Central and South
		America, Other
		Languages of Africa