Language
Although the United States has no official language at the federal level, 28 states have passed legislation making English the official language and it is considered to be the de facto national language. According to the 2000 U.S. Census, more than 97% of Americans can speak English well, and for 81% it is the only language spoken at home. More than 300 languages besides English have native speakers in the United States—some of which are spoken by the indigenous peoples (about 150 living languages) and others imported by immigrants.
Spanish has official status in the commonwealth of Puerto Rico and the state of New Mexico; Spanish is the primary spoken language in Puerto Rico and various smaller linguistic enclaves.[12] According to the 2000 census, there are nearly 30 million native speakers of Spanish in the United States. Bilingual speakers may use both English and Spanish reasonably well but code-switch according to their dialog partner or context. Some refer to this phenomenon as Spanglish.
Indigenous languages of the United States include the Native American languages, which are spoken on the country's numerous Indian reservations and Native American cultural events such as pow wows; Hawaiian, which has official status in the state of Hawaii; Chamorro, which has official status in the commonwealths of Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands; Carolinian, which has official status in the commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands; and Samoan, which has official status in the commonwealth of American Samoa. American Sign Language, used mainly by the deaf, is also native to the country.
The national dialect is known as American English, which itself consists of numerous regional dialects but has some shared unifying features that distinguish it from other national varieties of English. There are four large dialect regions in the United States—the North, the Midland, the South, and the West—and several smaller dialect regions such as those of New York City and Boston. A standard dialect called "General American" (analogous in some respects to the received pronunciation elsewhere in the English-speaking world), lacking the distinctive noticeable features of any particular region, is believed by some to exist as well; it is sometimes regionally associated with the vaguely-defined "Midwest".
Native language statistics for the United States[edit]
The following information is an estimation as actual statistics constantly vary.
According to the CIA,[13] the following is the percentage of total population's native languages in the United States:
English (82.1%)
Spanish (10.7%)
Other Indo-European languages (3.8%)
Other Asian or Pacific Islander languages (2.7%)
Other languages (0.7%)
Religion
Nearly every known religion is practiced in the United States, which was founded on the basis of religious freedom. About 83 percent of Americans identify themselves as Christians, according to an ABC poll, while 13 percent replied that they had no religion at all. Another poll in 2012 reported similar findings. It also found that Judaism is the second most-identified religious affiliation, at about 1.7 percent of the population. Only 0.6 percent of respondents identified as Muslim.