The US cities where English is not the main language at home

In Hialeah, Florida, 7.4 percent of residents speak only English at home. In a city of more than 220,000 people, more than 90% of the households use Spanish as the main language.

Nationally, about 78 percent of Americans speak only English at home. Here's a table of the cities with the lowest percentage of residents who speak only English at home.

The different kinds of places

Border cities. Laredo, Brownsville, and McAllen sit directly on the Rio Grande, in metros that function economically as part of a cross-border region. Spanish there is not an immigrant language in the usual sense. Many families have lived on that land for generations, in some cases since before the border even moved, and Spanish has simply never stopped being the working language.

Immigrant gateways. Hialeah and Miami are Cuban American centers built by successive waves of arrivals since 1959. Elizabeth, New Jersey is a similar story in the New York metro. These cities became so linguistically complete that a person can work, shop, worship, and get medical care without English, which removes the daily pressure to switch languages.

California working suburbs. East Los Angeles, El Monte, Santa Ana, and Salinas are dense, working-class communities where Mexican and Central American families concentrated over decades. El Monte adds a large Chinese and Vietnamese population, so it is one of the few entries on this list where the non-English languages are plural and not mainly Spanish.

Two clarifications

First, this stat measures the language spoken at home, not the ability to speak English. Someone perfectly fluent in English who speaks Spanish with their parents at the dinner table counts as not English-only. Bilingual households are actually the norm in most of these cities, not the exception.

Second, the pattern reverses across generations consistently. American research on immigrant languages has found the same thing for over a century: the first generation speaks the home language, the second is bilingual, and the third is usually English-dominant. A city can hold its language share steady for decades while individual families move through that cycle, because new arrivals keep replacing the households that have shifted.

Nationally, Spanish is spoken at home by roughly 13 percent of Americans, and the concentration in these cities reflects where Spanish-speaking communities settled rather than any national shift away from English. The origin-group geography behind it is in where the most Mexican Americans live and on our origin pages.

Sources

Language figures are from the U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey 5-year estimates, table B16001, which asks whether a person aged five and over speaks a language other than English at home. The measure covers home language use, not English proficiency, which the survey records separately. Cities shown have at least 100,000 residents.