As they say in Italian, Così va il mondo. For our US readers, hardly any of whom speak the language anymore, let me translate: “So the world goes.” From 2001 to 2017, the number of Americans speaking Italian at home dropped from almost 900,000 to just over 550,000, an incredible 38% reduction in just 16 years. Among languages with at least 100,000 US speakers in 2001, no language saw a larger decrease, in either absolute or percentage terms—though Hungarian was close by percentage. The data is from the US Census.

The rapid decline of Italian in the US is due to two major factors. The first one is very simple. There are many fewer Italian-born residents of the US today. The population fell from about 530,000 in 2001 to under 400,000 in 2017. This explains about 40% of the fall in Italian speakers. The lack of migration to the US is largely due to the increasing prosperity of Italy across second half of the 20th century—while US GDP per person was almost double that of Italy in 1960, it is only about 50% greater today.