english is the "de facto" national language of the united states, with 82% of the population claiming it as a mother tongue, and some 96% claiming to speak it "well" or "very well". however, no "official language" exists at the federal level. there have been several proposals to make english the national language in amendments to immigration reform bills, but none of these bills have made a federal language. however, some states have adopted the english language as their official language. on the other hand, a lot of another languages, like spanish, french, italian, arabic, japanese, korean, russian, polish, finnish, dutch, german, swedish, norwegian, danish, welsh, irish, scottish gaelic, hindi, mandarin, hebrew, cantonese, chinese, ukrainian, navajo, indonesian, malay, vietnamese, tagalog, portuguese, etc. are spoken in the united states as second languages.