By Beatriz Pascual Macias

Washington, May 12 (EFE).– Hispanics living in the United States are becoming more fluent in English and speak less Spanish at home, according to a Pew Research Center report published Tuesday in Washington.

As Hispanics’ command of English grows – 68 percent now speak it easily – the percentage of Latinos who choose Spanish for their conversations at home diminishes, according to Pew.

The proportion of Hispanics who speak English with fluency has climbed from 59 percent in the year 2000 to 68 percent in 2013, while the proportion of Latinos who use Spanish for family chat has ebbed from 78 percent in 2000 to 73 percent in 2013.

In all, 33.2 million Hispanics speak English easily, 12.5 million can get along in the language and 3.2 million admit they don’t really speak it, according to the Pew study.

Despite the lower percentage of people speaking Spanish at home, the total number of Hispanics who speak that language, 38.5 million, has increased in recent years, due principally to the growing number of Hispanic births and less to the influx of Latin American immigrants, which has dropped in recent years.

For that reason, the use of Spanish has been marked over the past few years by the birth of new U.S. citizens of Hispanic descent, which in 2013 topped by 35 million the 19 million U.S. Latinos who were born abroad.

The increase in Hispanic births in the United States is a key factor in explaining the growing use of English, the pollsters say.

According to the study, besides the place of birth, other factors such as age, gender and educational level are influential in orienting a person to use one language rather than another in most conversations.

In that sense, the pollsters note that 21 percent of Hispanics who do not speak English are age 65 years or older and, by sex, 57 percent are women.

The survey also shows that 75 percent of Hispanics who do not speak English were also unable to graduate from high school, while those Latinos with a university education speak English perfectly in 61 percent of the cases.

To paint this picture of linguistic trends in the Hispanic population between 1980 and 2013, the researchers of the Pew Center used data from the U.S. Census Bureau. EFE