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Bilingual Education
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Ending E.O. 13166,
   the "Multilingual    Mandate"


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Status of Language Laws of New York

New York does not have official English, and it does not allow referenda or voter initiatives.
In 2002, Mayor Michael Bloomberg was elected after promising to scrap the city's bilingual education programs, but he has since decidedly to greatly increase support for bilingual education.

28 percent of this state's residents speak a language other than English in their homes.
The most common of these languages are Spanish, Italian, Chinese, and French.
This state has the nation's highest proportion of speakers of Italian, Russian, Yiddish, Hebrew, Serbo-Croat, Romanian, Bengali, and Malayam.
Nearly one million New Yorkers speak little or no English.
There are over half a million households where no-one over 14 years old speaks English.
Most non-English speaking New Yorkers live in New York City, where bilingual education is the favored technique for educating "English Language Learners."

The foreign languages most commonly spoken as the primary language in the home are (adults):
Spanish (1,875,879)
Chinese (316,635)
Italian (273,620)
Russian (187,016)
French (152,534)
Polish (100,055)
French Creole (90,168)
Korean (85,623)
German (85,183)
Other Indic languages (77,717)
Yiddish (77,053)
Greek (76,473)
Tagalog (59,014)
Arabic (55,803)
Hebrew (52,940)