 Does the U.S. have an official language?
It is surprisingly that for more than 200 years, America lived without declaring English their official language. English Only legislation first appeared in 1981 as a constitutional English Language Amendment but the measure never came to Congressional vote. Since 1981, 22 states have adopted various forms of Official English legislation, in addition to four that had already done so. Subtracting Hawai'i (which is officially bilingual with English and Hawaiian being the official languages) and Alaska (whose English-only initiative has been declared unconstitutional) leaves a total of 24 states with active Official English laws.
How many languages are spoken in the U.S.?
The USA is highly multilingual. Here you can here 311 languages spoken, including 162 indigenous and 149 immigrant languages. An indigenous or autochthonous language means language that is native to a region and spoken by indigenous local peoples.
In 14 million of US families people speak not English language. One in five people over age 5 speaks a language other than English. The large number of foreign language speakers in the United States is a consequence of recent immigration.
Most spoken languages in the U.S.
| Language | Million peple | Percentage | | English | 215,423,555 | 82,10% | | Spanish | 28,100,725 | 10,71% | | French | 1,606,790 | 0,61% | | Mandarin | 1,499,635 | 0,57% | | German | 1,382,610 | 0,52% | | Tagalog | 1,224,245 | 0,46% | | Vietnamese | 1,009,625 | 0,38% | | Italian | 1,008,370 | 0,38% | | Korean | 894,065 | 0,34% | | Russian | 706,240 | 0,26% | | Polish | 667,415 | 0,25% | | Arabic | 614,580 | 0,23% | | Portuguese | 563,830 | 0,21% | | Japanese | 478,000 | 0,18% | | French Creole | 453,365 | 0,17% | | Greek | 365,440 | 0,13% | | Hindi | 317,055 | 0,12% | | Persian | 312,080 | 0,11% | | Urdu | 262,895 | 0,10% | | Cantonese | 259,745 | 0,09% |
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