On May 27, AAA President Virginia Dominguez sent a letter to the Census Bureau regarding its language questions and classifications, which you can find through AAA Challenges Questions on US Census and the AAA homepage.
The letter was written by the newly constituted SLA Committee on Language and Social Justice, which partners with the AAA Committee on Human Rights (CfHR). It suggests several alternatives for the classification of speakers who live in households where no one over the age of 14 speaks English “very well” as “linguistically isolated.” This is a follow up to the AAA’s 2007 AAA resolution (seeStatement on Language Questions in the US Census), and previous correspondence with the Census Bureau. Those letters, which can be viewed through Committee for Human Rights, reveal the unwillingness of the Census Bureau to change the language questions, but a willingness to re-consider their use of “Linguistically Isolated.” The Committee is hopeful that their efforts over the last four years will finally result in critical changes in the way the Census 2010 data are reported, and we will continue to press for changes in the language questions themselves.
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