Contrary to some political sayings, the United States is a country of immigrants and has been so from the very beginning. Along with the original native languages of the today’s powerful nation, many others have enriched its linguistic heritage throughout its history. In the 13 colonies, for example, there were Dutch, French, and German speakers. In fact, about 500 languages have been spoken historically in the US.

The US Census Bureau released, in 2015, “the most comprehensive data ever released” (updated in 2017) reporting that there are 350 languages in US homes. The findings revealed an enormous diversity across the country, dividing the information in 15 areas. In San Francisco, for instance, 40 percent of the population age 5 and over speak a language other than English at home.

Of course, English is by far the most spoken language with 231,122,908 speakers; however, it does not mean that English is the US official language. The reason? Simply, there is not official language stated in the Constitution. All the attempts of Senators to introduce amendments have failed, maybe because all Americans (and immigrants) already agree that English is the de facto primary language – the one of official documents, formal education, media usage, etc.

Second to English, Spanish has 40.5 million speakers. The large number of Latin American people living in different areas of the US is a good enough reason for this. Although the Latino population is high, with 58.9 million Hispanic people (18.1% of total population), the use of Spanish remains at steady levels, due to the children embracing English. According to the 2017 Census survey, 22.5 million Spanish speakers also speak English “very well”, while 6.8 million speak English “well”.

After Spanish, which has notorious prevalence in the whole country (it is the most popular in 47 out of the 50 states), third place is not is geographically that clear and it gets specific for each region. German, the second place for hundreds of years, stays now in third for some states, with over a million speakers nationwide. This decrease is owe to its suppression during World War II.

But is Chinese –no surprise here– the one that scores 3 in the country. Both Mandarin and Cantonese dialects are spoken from Washington to Texas and from Virginia to Oregon. According to the Migration Policy Institute (MPI), Chinese immigrants are the third-largest foreign-born group, following Mexicans and Indians. Americans of Chinese descent, including those with partial Chinese ancestry constitute 1.5% of the total population.

Tagalog (1.7 million speakers), Vietnamese (1.5 million), Arabic (1.2 million), French (1.2 million), Korean (1.1 million), and Russian (0.91 million) complete the Top 10 of the most spoken languages in the US. Nevertheless, there are many d beautiful languages spoken nationwide, such as Navajo, Bengali and even Persian.

Immigration has created an interesting plethora of knowledge and customs. Languages are only a small part of the huge kaleidoscope of mixed cultures in the United States, and this is maybe the reason why Americans love so much the country.

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