section_path: Demographics/Language
section_name: Language
paragraph_text: Language
  
  While many languages are spoken in the United States, English is by far the most commonly spoken and written. English was made the official language of the United States by Executive Order 14224 in 2025. However, Congress has never passed a bill to designate English as the official language of all three federal branches. Some laws, such as U.S. naturalization requirements, nonetheless standardize English. Twenty-eight states and the United States Virgin Islands have declared English as the sole official language; 19 states and the District of Columbia have no official language. Three states and four U.S. territories have recognized local or indigenous languages in addition to English: Hawaii (Hawaiian), Alaska (twenty Native languages), South Dakota (Sioux), American Samoa (Samoan), Puerto Rico (Spanish), Guam (Chamorro), and the Northern Mariana Islands (Carolinian and Chamorro). In total, 169 Native American languages are spoken in the United States. In Puerto Rico, Spanish is more widely spoken than English.
  
  According to the American Community Survey (2020), some 245.4 million people in the U.S. age five and older spoke only English at home. About 41.2 million spoke Spanish at home, making it the second most commonly used language. Other languages spoken at home by one million people or more include Chinese (3.40 million), Tagalog (1.71 million), Vietnamese (1.52 million), Arabic (1.39 million), French (1.18 million), Korean (1.07 million), and Russian (1.04 million). German, spoken by 1 million people at home in 2010, fell to 857,000 total speakers in 2020.