Languages |
There is no official language of the United States, according to the U.S. government. Many languages in the United States are used, or historically have been used. Over 500 languages are spoken at various levels by the U.S. population. The most commonly used language is English (specifically American English), which is the de facto national language of the United States. Since the 1965 Immigration Act, Spanish is the second most common language in the country. The state government of Louisiana offers services and documents in French, as does New Mexico in Spanish. There are many languages indigenous to North America or to U.S. states or holdings in the Pacific region. Hawaiian, although having few native speakers, is an official language along with English at the state level in Hawaii. Alaska recognizes twenty Native languages as official. Language Spoken at Home (U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2016) According to the American Community Survey 2016, endorsed by the United States Census Bureau, the languages spoken at home with over 100,000 (in millions) speakers older than five are: English only – 237.8 million Spanish – 40.5 million Chinese (incl. Mandarin and Cantonese) – 3.4 million Tagalog (incl. Filipino) – 1.7 million Vietnamese – 1.5 million Arabic – 1.2 million French (incl. Cajun) – 1.2 million Korean – 1.1 million Russian – 0.91 million German – 0.91 million Haitian – 0.86 million Hindi – 0.81 million Portuguese – 0.77 million Italian – 0.58 million Polish – 0.54 million Urdu – 0.47 million Japanese – 0.46 million Persian (incl. Farsi and Dari) – 0.44 million Gujarati – 0.41 million Telugu – 0.37 million Bengali – 0.32 million Tai–Kadai (incl. Thai and Lao) – 0.31 million Greek – 0.29 million Punjabi – 0.29 million Tamil – 0.27 million Armenian – 0.24 million Serbo-Croatian – 0.24 million Hebrew – 0.23 million Hmong – 0.22 million Bantu (incl. Swahili) – 0.22 million Khmer – 0.20 million Navajo – 0.16 million |