Rockville ranked seventh overall and fourth among small cities in the U.S. for its ethnic diversity, placing highly again in an annual WalletHub study.
Rockville, Gaithersburg, Germantown and Silver Spring occupy the top four spots on WalletHub’s list and four of the top 10 spots among all cities, of any size, in the entire United States.
“The U.S. today is a melting pot of cultures, thanks to increasing ethnic and racial diversification,” WalletHub stated in its Feb. 17 release of the study. “If the trend continues, America will be more colorful than ever by 2045, at which point no single ethnic group will constitute the majority in the U.S. for the first time.
Gaithersburg took top billing on the list of small cities with fewer than 100,000 residents. Rockville earned the same high placement among small cities in WalletHub’s 2017-2020 studies.
To identify the most ethnically diverse places in America, WalletHub compared more than 500 of the largest U.S. cities across three key metrics.
Rockville ranked 30th overall in ethno-racial diversity, ninth overall in linguistic diversity and 29th overall in birthplace diversity.
More than one-third of the city’s 68,298 residents were born outside of the U.S.
The city’s total population is 68,268, according to a 2018 population estimate from the U.S. Census Bureau. Of those, 28.9% are Asian, 15.3% are Hispanic or Latino, and 10.7% are black. More than 45 percent spoke a language other than English at home.
Read the complete rankings on WalletHub.