Language Usage in the United States

Although English is not de jure the official language of the United States, it is de facto the language spoken by the majority of Americans and is used in all public domains. At the same time, the languages of the indigenous population, settlers other than the British, enslaved people, and immigrants are also broadly spoken in the United States. The territory that was to become the United States was teeming with languages prior to 1776. At the time of the European encroachment, there were upward of two million Native Americans, speaking over 300 languages, north of what is today Mexico. Conflict and warfare with the colonizers, and the disease they brought, decimated the Native American population.

By 1868, the Indian Peace Commission recommended that “their barbarous dialects” be “blotted out.” Indigenous children were removed from their parents and were put in boarding schools, where instruction would be only in English. According to the 2010 U.S. Census, today there are only 373,949 speakers of Native American languages. The rich linguistic diversity of Native Americans has also been greatly reduced. The 300 Native American languages that were spoken in what is today the United States had been reduced to 133 by 2010. Today, 46 percent of Native Americans speak Navajo, and only the languages Yupik, Dakota, Apache, Keres, and Cherokee have more than 10,000 speakers. Only 7 percent of the Native American population is now bilingual, and most Native Americans today speak only English.

The same story of linguistic decimation can be told about the languages of people who were enslaved. From the early decades of the 18th century until the end of the Civil War in 1865, over 12 million Africans, speaking many African languages as well as Arabic, were enslaved and brought to the United States. The policy of separating Africans who were able to communicate with each other resulted in a gradual shift to English. Today, some African Americans show, in their speech, features that some attribute to a process of “decreolization.” That is, what is often described as African American English Vernacular, or Ebonics, consists of a substratum of features that some argue come from African languages. However, African Americans today are, for the most part, English monolingual, although many are bidialectal. If Native American languages have significantly shrunk, the languages of the African people who were enslaved were simply wiped out totally, with only traces of features remaining in the speech of some.

The early white European colonizers and settlers brought with them many other languages besides English, especially Spanish, French, and Dutch, but also Danish, German, and Swedish. Spanish was spoken in Florida, Las Californias, and Santa Fe de Nuevo Mexico; French was spoken in Louisiana; Dutch was spoken in New Netherlands (New York); and Swedish was spoken in New Sweden (Delaware). From the 18th century on, Germans settled especially in Pennsylvania, where by 1830, one-third of the white population was of German descent. The first U.S. census, taken in 1790, showed that 25 percent of the white population spoke languages other than English.

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