What are the main ethnic groups in the United States and their percentage of the population? What languages are spoken in the United States, and what are those percentages?

The most commonly used language in the United States is English (specifically, American English), which is the de facto national language. Nonetheless, many other languages are also spoken, or historically have been spoken, in the United States. These include indigenous languages, languages brought to the country by colonists, enslaved people and immigrants from Europe, Africa and Asia. There are also several languages, including creoles and sign languages, that developed in the United States. Approximately 430 languages are spoken or signed by the population, of which 176 are indigenous to the area. Fifty-two languages formerly spoken in the country's territory are now extinct.

Based on annual data from the American Community Survey (ACS), the U.S. Census Bureau regularly publishes information on the most common languages spoken at home. It also reports the English speaking ability of people who speak a language other than English at home. In 2017, the U.S. Census Bureau published information on the number of speakers of over 350 languages as surveyed by the ACS from 2009 to 2013,but it does not regularly tabulate and report data for that many languages.

Language Spoken at Home

(U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2017)

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According to the ACS in 2017, the most common languages spoken at home by people aged five years of age or older are as follows (the most recent data can be found via the U.S. Census Bureau's ACS chart at [3]):

English only – 239 million

Spanish – 41 million

Chinese (including Mandarin and Cantonese) – 3.5 million

Tagalog (including Filipino) – 1.7 million

Vietnamese – 1.5 million

Arabic – 1.2 million

French – 1.2 million

Korean – 1.1 million

Russian – 0.94 million

German – 0.92 million

Haitian Creole – 0.87 million

Hindi – 0.86 million

Portuguese – 0.79 million

Italian – 0.58 million

Polish – 0.52 million

Urdu – 0.51 million

Yiddish – 0.51 million

Japanese – 0.46 million

Persian (including Farsi, Dari and Tajik) – 0.42 million

Gujarati – 0.41 million

Telugu – 0.37 million

Bengali – 0.32 million

Tai–Kadai (including Thai and Lao) – 0.31 million

Urdu – 0.3 million

Greek – 0.27 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 languages (including Swahili) – 0.22 million

Khmer – 0.20 million

Navajo – 0.16 million