The US census is finally counting how many people speak Tamil, Punjabi, Telugu, and Bengali.

Marketers, analysts and consultants continually watch for demographics trends on the Non-Resident Indian community in the US and North America. These trends serve many purposes and also enable focused marketing to an ethnic community.

Wouldn’t Amazon want to know if you are of Tamil origin and begin marketing Pongal related items a month before January? Likewise marketing in advance of Holi and Lohri if you happen to be a Punjabi. Details of ethnic subgroup, especially of those from a South Asian background are valuable to marketers. e-Commerce giants like Amazon, Google, Apple aspire to know detailed demographics of their target consumers and use sophisticated algorithms, cookies and tracking to build databases.

Desi Associations across the US and small businesses and Indian markets also actively court members of ethnic communities. In regions with a larger population of a particular community, one can see multiple associations focused on sub-groups. Likewise one might see multiple Indian restaurants catering to Punjabi, Andhra, Canara, Chettinad and other specialized cuisines in a region with higher population of such communities.

The recent move by US census bureau to track “Language Spoken at Home and English-Speaking Ability” of ethnic communities is an interesting development being watched by marketers. A recent announcement indicates that New data for five languages are available on American Fact Finder Table B16001: Haitian, Punjabi, Bengali, Telugu and Tamil.

Of the 280,867 people ages 5 and older who spoke Punjabi at home, 48.0 percent lived in California.

at home, 48.0 percent lived in California. Of the 259,204 people ages 5 and older who spoke Bengali at home, 38.6 percent lived in New York.

at home, 38.6 percent lived in New York. The 321,695 people ages 5 and older who spoke Telugu at home and the 238,699 people speaking Tamil at home were more evenly distributed across many parts of the nation. For both languages, the highest concentration of speakers lived in California, followed by Texas and New Jersey (the number of persons who spoke Tamil in Texas and New Jersey are not statistically different).

In the past years, GaramChai.com has been publishing summary of ethnic data from different sources “Indians, Indo-American and NRIs in the US – Fatcts and Figures” and summary of inputs from a review of Census data.

The US census is finally counting how many people speak Tamil, Punjabi, Telugu, and Bengali