Languages Spoken in the U.S.

By Elizabeth Gregory

So I'm sure many of you have heard the bad joke that goes - what do you call someone who speaks 2 languages? Bilingual. What do you call someone who speaks 3 languages? Trilingual. What do you call someone who speaks one language? American.

Of course, I've only heard non-Americans laugh at that joke. Oddly enough, there are millions of Americans (over 46 million actually) who do speak more than one language. Although English is the primary language spoken in the US, head south to Miami or Texas and you may feel like a foreigner with the amount of Spanish you hear on the streets, on the radio, and announced in the airport.

So, I did a little research as to how many Americans speak a foreign language. According to Wikipedia:

"The United States is home to approximately 336 languages (spoken or signed) of which 176 are indigenous to the area. 52 languages formerly spoken in the US territory are now extinct."

Which languages are the most popular? Spanish of course is the 2nd most popular language with almost 30 million speakers (probably not including those who just took a few years of it in school).

Following distantly behind Spanish in numbers of speakers are: Chinese, French, German, Tagalog, Vietnamese, and Italian, each with over a million Americans speaking those languages. It was interesting to learn that among the top languages spoken by Americans at home is one that has been spoken in this country long before English and Spanish arrived — Navajo.

Modern Language Association gives a neat layout of what languages are spoken where.