More Than Half of Los Angeles Speaks a Language Other Than English at Home

Any trip to a public place is a reminder that Los Angeles is a linguistically diverse town, but new data from the US Census reveals just how diverse: in the LA metro area, at least 185 languages are spoken at home, according to the Census's just-released language data from the American Community Survey 2009-2013. That's narrowly second only to New York, which has at least 192 (but a far larger population). Non-English languages are so common, actually, that 54 percent of people in the LA metro area who are over five years old don't speak English at home. (That doesn't necessarily mean that they don't also speak English.) That's compared to only 38 percent in New York.

Spanish speakers were the definite majority among people who speak something other than English when at home, but other common at-home languages include Chinese, Tagalog, Korean, and Armenian. Welsh, Yiddish, Navajo, and Icelandic were far less commonly spoken at home, but were also represented. The Census also calls out Indonesian as one of the least common languages, with 12,750 speakers, although that's not the tiniest by far. There are 35 Kazakh speakers in LA, 120 Catalonian speakers, and 20 people who speak Apache (the full table is below).

· Census Bureau Reports at Least 350 Languages Spoken in U.S. Homes [ACS]