This is the first assessment of its kind to document ACS CATI language needs over a three-year span of full sample size, and is meant to provide the telephone center staff with information that will be valuable in making recruitment and hiring decisions.

For each year, two sets of monthly CATI-eligible language workloads were estimated. The first set estimates the monthly number of households eligible for CATI that may have a general language need or preference for a given language (language workloads), while the second set estimates the monthly number of households eligible for CATI that are likely to have a critical language need (linguistically isolated language workloads). These estimated workloads by language are compared with the number of call center interviewers that are available to conduct interviews in a particular language.

Although the linguistically isolated language workload is roughly less than ten percent of the household language workload, analyzing the needs of linguistically isolated households to make language assistance services available to them is critical for obtaining quality data in the ACS.

Major findings:

• We estimate that approximately 4,000 CATI cases each month require language support. In 2008, there were 18 languages that made up 95.4 percent of the total linguistically isolated workload. Another 21 languages made up the remaining 4.6 percent.
• Changes in monthly linguistically isolated language workloads were moderate over 2006 to 2008, except for the increase in the Spanish linguistically isolated workload.
• The Census Telephone Center interviewers support at least ten of the top fourteen linguistically isolated languages of 2008. Overall, the telephone center is satisfactorily equipped with the necessary language skills to accommodate a wide range of linguistically isolated languages.