What’s the Fastest-Growing Language in the U.S.? You’ll Never Guess.

Not many people would guess correctly if asked which foreign language has the fastest-growing population of speakers in the United States. It is (so Quartz India reported this week) Telugu, a Dravidian language of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana states. In 2000, the U.S. had less than 88,000 speakers of Telugu; by last year it was more than 415,000.

India is divided roughly across the middle by a boundary between the Indic languages of the north (like Hindustani, which I wrote about recently) and ...