Most Spoken Language After English

A Southeast Asian arc runs from Hawaii and California through Nevada and Colorado to Texas, and in each of those states the most spoken language after English and Spanish is either Tagalog or Vietnamese. The two languages arrive through different U.S. military histories: Filipino immigration to the mainland accelerated after the Philippines became a U.S. territory in 1898, while Vietnamese resettlement followed the fall of Saigon in 1975. Tagalog clusters along the Pacific Coast and in Hawaii; Vietnamese concentrates in Texas, Oregon, Colorado, and the Gulf states.

California alone has roughly 1.1 million Tagalog home speakers, more than half the country's total; that figure exceeds the entire population of several smaller states. Texas's Vietnamese community, centered on Houston's Midtown and the suburb of Sugar Land, is the second-largest in the country after Southern California. Vietnamese-language Catholic churches and grocery districts are among the most spatially concentrated markers of post-1975 resettlement in the American landscape.

Wisconsin adds a third chapter: Hmong refugees, resettled after fighting alongside U.S. forces in the Secret War in Laos, created communities in the Fox Valley and Green Bay that now represent the second-largest Hmong population in the US after California. Hmong-language radio still broadcasts in the Fox Valley. Minnesota is the only state where two Southeast Asian refugee languages both rank among the top non-English non-Spanish speakers: Somali leads, but Hmong is close behind, a result of the state's unusually broad refugee resettlement policy across two separate conflicts.

Four states have a Native American language as their most widely spoken non-English non-Spanish tongue: Arizona and New Mexico (Navajo), Oklahoma (Cherokee), South Dakota (Lakota), and Alaska (Yupik). Of these, Navajo is by far the largest, with an estimated 170,000 speakers across the two-state Navajo Nation. It is the most widely spoken indigenous language in the United States and is not currently considered endangered, though the share of young speakers has declined. The Navajo Nation's language program is one of the best-funded tribal language efforts in the country.

Cherokee presents a different picture. With roughly 2,000 highly fluent speakers and a broader pool of partial or ceremonial speakers, Cherokee is endangered but actively resisted. The Cherokee Nation established a language immersion school in 2001 that graduates students who grow up speaking Cherokee as a first language, the only such pipeline for any indigenous language east of the Mississippi. Oklahoma's status as the historic seat of the Five Civilized Tribes after the Trail of Tears gives it a native language speaker count that no other state east of the Plains can match; that concentration is especially visible when Cherokee counties are overlaid on the population density by state map, where reservation geography stands apart from the surrounding region.

Lakota in South Dakota and Yupik in Alaska are both in more precarious positions. The Pine Ridge and Rosebud reservations have active immersion efforts, but ACS estimates fewer than 16,000 Lakota home speakers statewide. Yupik is more resilient: it is one of the few Native languages in the US still transmitted to children in village settings in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, and linguists classify it as 'definitely endangered' rather than 'critically endangered,' a meaningful distinction reflecting real intergenerational transmission still occurring in some communities.

Illinois and Michigan each have a third language that no neighboring state shares, and both trace to a single hiring decision. Chicago's Polish-American community, built by migration waves from the 1880s through World War II and reinforced by post-Solidarity emigration in the 1980s, is the largest outside Warsaw; the Avondale neighborhood still supports Polish-language schools and a Polish consulate. Dearborn, Michigan owes its Arabic-speaking majority to Ford Motor Company's early-20th-century recruitment of Lebanese workers to the River Rouge plant, a workforce that expanded through successive waves of Lebanese, Yemeni, and Iraqi immigration.

Florida's Haitian Creole figure is among the most striking in the table: an estimated 600,000 speakers make Florida the global second home of Haitian Creole, after Haiti itself. Little Haiti in Miami and Haitian communities in Broward County have produced Haitian Creole media, schools, and political representation that are invisible to most visitors to the state. Haitian Creole has more speakers in Florida than Polish has in Illinois, yet Illinois's Polish story is better known, partly because it predates mass media coverage of Caribbean immigration by nearly a century.

Arkansas's Marshallese community in Springdale, the largest outside the Marshall Islands, came through the Compact of Free Association, which requires no US visa; most arrived for poultry-processing jobs and have since built a community of roughly 40,000 people in a state with no Pacific coastline or prior Pacific Islander presence. Minnesota's Somali community at Cedar-Riverside in Minneapolis is larger than any Somali diaspora in Europe. Polish in Chicago has an estimated 185,000 home speakers; Somali in Minneapolis has 130,000; neither figure is predictable from the demographics of surrounding states.