Languages of the United States | Wikipedia audio article
Channel: Subhajit Sahu
Date: 2018-11-18

Many languages are spoken, or historically have been spoken, in the United States. Today over 350 languages are used 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 United States does not have an official language, but 32 state governments out of 50 have declared English to be one, or the only, official language. The government of Louisiana offers services and most documents in both English and French, as does New Mexico in English and Spanish. The government of Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory, operates almost entirely in Spanish, even though its official languages are Spanish and English. 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 of the state of Hawaii. Alaska officializes English and twenty native languages. 

According to the 2016 American Community Survey, a project of the United States Census Bureau, the languages spoken at home by the most people older than five years of age are:

English only –  229.7 million
Spanish –  40.5 million
Chinese (including Mandarin and Cantonese) –  3.4 million
Tagalog (including Filipino) –  1.7 million
Vietnamese –  1.5 million
Arabic –  1.2 million
French –  1.2 million
Korean –  1.1 million
Russian –  0.91 million
German –  0.91 million
Haitian Creole –  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 (including Farsi and Dari) –  0.44 million
Gujarati –  0.41 million
Telugu –  0.37 million
Bengali –  0.32 million
Tai–Kadai (including Thai and Lao) –  0.31 million
Greek –  0.29 million
Punjabi –  0.29 million
Tamil –  0.27 million
Armenian –  0.24 million
Serbo-Croatian (including Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian) –  0.24 million
Hebrew –  0.23 million
Hmong –  0.22 million
Bantu (including Swahili) –  0.22 million
Khmer –  0.20 million
Navajo –  0.16 millionWhile modern estimates indicate that American Sign Language was signed by as many as 500,000 Americans, as of 1972—the last official survey, closer estimates range around 100,000 as of 2011. (Although various cultural factors, such as passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, have resulted in far greater educational opportunities for deaf children, which could double or triple the number of current ASL users.)