So, how many languages are spoken in Los Angeles?
At least 185, by the U.S. Census Bureau’s count, and almost certainly more. When the Census Bureau published its detailed language tables in 2015, built from survey answers collected between 2009 and 2013, it found at least 185 languages spoken at home in the Los Angeles metro area. Of the 15 largest metro areas, only New York, at 192, had more. The other number you will often see, 224, is not a Census figure. It belongs to the late UCLA linguist Vyacheslav Ivanov, who at one point counted at least 224 identified languages in Los Angeles County, not counting dialects (and anyone who has sat through a linguistics seminar knows that the line between a language and a dialect gets drawn by history and politics at least as often as by linguists).
However you count them, people who speak only English at home are in the minority here. In 2024, 55.2 percent of Los Angeles County residents aged 5 and older spoke a language other than English at home, according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, and inside the City of Los Angeles the figure was 56.6 percent. Among the 55 metro areas in the 50 states and D.C. with a million or more residents, only Miami (56.4 percent) and San Jose (55.3 percent) top the Los Angeles metro area’s 53.5 percent.
If you live here, you have stood in a line or sat on a bus where English was not the language being spoken. Spanish is the obvious one: 39.0 percent of City of Los Angeles residents aged 5 and older speak it at home, and 37.6 percent countywide. Grab some food in the San Gabriel Valley and the odds shift toward Chinese. In Monterey Park, 42.1 percent of residents aged 5 and older speak Chinese at home (Census estimates for 2020 to 2024), and San Gabriel (40.1 percent) and Temple City (39.1 percent) are within the margin of error of it. Whether the people at the next table are speaking Mandarin or Cantonese, the Census can’t tell you; it counts every Chinese variety as one language.
Spanish as a cultural cornerstone
The role of Spanish in Los Angeles: Spanish has been spoken here since the pueblo was founded (Tongva was here long before either Spanish or English), and it never left. Today 3,489,855 county residents aged 5 and older speak Spanish at home, and about 58 percent of them also speak English “very well,” which is a fair description of how much of LA actually lives, switching between the two without a second thought. Spanish speakers in LA even have their own slang, much of it borrowed from Mexico.
Why LA suits language learners
Learning languages in L.A. Los Angeles is an easy place to learn a language because the practice partners are already here. Whatever you are studying, there is probably a market or a neighbor’s grandmother within a short drive who will let you try it out. Strommen has leaned on that since 2006. Whether you are learning for work, for family or because you are tired of pointing at the menu, the city gives you somewhere to use it the same afternoon.
Ranking LA’s most spoken languages
The most commonly spoken languages in Los Angeles County (residents aged 5 and older, 2024):
1. English, the lingua franca. English is the most common single language at home, with 4,158,130 people (44.8 percent) speaking only English. It is the working language of business and school, and the one most bilingual Angelenos switch into when two language groups meet.
2. Spanish, a close second. Spanish follows with 3,489,855 speakers, 37.6 percent of everyone aged 5 and older. That makes the county a very good place to learn Spanish, with real conversations on offer at the nearest taco stand, and at the pediatrician’s office too. If you want a teacher who lives here too, most of the Spanish tutors we work with around LA teach in person.
3. Asian languages, a significant presence. Chinese is the largest language group after Spanish, with 383,333 speakers, and far more of them live outside the city limits than inside (the City of Los Angeles has 66,929). Tagalog comes next at 224,158 speakers; the Census files it as “Tagalog (incl. Filipino),” since Filipino, the national language of the Philippines, is based on Tagalog. Korean has 147,864 speakers, more than half of them in the City of Los Angeles, Koreatown included. Further down are Vietnamese (71,281), Japanese (47,680) and Khmer (21,652), the language you will hear in Long Beach’s Cambodia Town.
4. Armenian and Farsi, two large diaspora languages. Armenian is spoken at home by 198,707 county residents, which works out to roughly three of every four people in the United States who speak Armenian at home. You will hear it from Little Armenia in East Hollywood to Glendale and Burbank. The Census counts Armenian as a single language, so it can’t separate Eastern Armenian (the standard of the Republic of Armenia and of Iran’s Armenians) from Western Armenian (the standard of the diaspora that grew out of the Ottoman Empire), and Los Angeles has speakers of both. Persian, which the Census lists as “Persian (incl. Farsi, Dari),” has 74,454 speakers, about seven in ten of them inside the City of Los Angeles, home to the stretch of Westwood that earned the nickname Tehrangeles.
5. Other European languages. Russian is the largest of these, with 58,392 speakers, followed by French (34,590), German (21,059) and Italian (12,716). Portuguese, Greek, Polish and Serbo-Croatian each have communities in the thousands.
Diversity as fertile ground
For anyone learning a language, all of this means you rarely have to leave the county to practice. The numbers also come with a lesson about counting. The Census hears “Chinese,” not Cantonese or Mandarin, and “Armenian,” not Eastern or Western, so the real number of languages and varieties spoken in this county is larger than any table can show. I happen to think that is one of the best things about living here.
The full list: LA County’s home languages by the numbers
The full list below covers all 42 language categories the American Community Survey publishes for Los Angeles County, largest first. Several of them are groups rather than single languages, and the smallest rows rest on very few survey responses, so read their margins of error before you quote them.
| Language (Census category) | Speakers aged 5+ | Margin of error (±) | Share of all residents aged 5+ | Share who speak English less than “very well” |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All residents aged 5+ | 9,282,796 | 518 | 100.0% | — |
| Speak only English | 4,158,130 | 36,942 | 44.8% | — |
| Spanish | 3,489,855 | 26,372 | 37.6% | 42.4% |
| Chinese (incl. Mandarin, Cantonese) | 383,333 | 13,799 | 4.1% | 57.3% |
| Tagalog (incl. Filipino) | 224,158 | 12,636 | 2.4% | 29.7% |
| Armenian | 198,707 | 13,177 | 2.1% | 45.6% |
| Korean | 147,864 | 9,799 | 1.6% | 59.7% |
| Persian (incl. Farsi, Dari) | 74,454 | 8,772 | 0.8% | 37.5% |
| Vietnamese | 71,281 | 7,810 | 0.8% | 62.7% |
| Russian | 58,392 | 7,860 | 0.6% | 46.1% |
| Arabic | 49,754 | 6,664 | 0.5% | 39.5% |
| Japanese | 47,680 | 4,972 | 0.5% | 37.8% |
| French (incl. Cajun) | 34,590 | 5,392 | 0.4% | 17.2% |
| Hindi | 27,281 | 4,727 | 0.3% | 21.1% |
| Ilocano, Samoan, Hawaiian, or other Austronesian languages | 26,704 | 4,276 | 0.3% | 35.1% |
| Thai, Lao, or other Tai-Kadai languages | 22,033 | 3,494 | 0.2% | 55.8% |
| Hebrew | 21,983 | 3,893 | 0.2% | 13.3% |
| Khmer | 21,652 | 3,624 | 0.2% | 59.6% |
| German | 21,059 | 2,939 | 0.2% | 6.1% |
| Bengali | 14,609 | 3,380 | 0.2% | 43.7% |
| Amharic, Somali, or other Afro-Asiatic languages | 14,566 | 5,027 | 0.2% | 29.5% |
| Other and unspecified languages | 14,075 | 3,280 | 0.2% | 46.8% |
| Yoruba, Twi, Igbo, or other languages of Western Africa | 13,894 | 3,554 | 0.1% | 21.5% |
| Portuguese | 13,636 | 2,534 | 0.1% | 25.1% |
| Other Indo-European languages | 12,996 | 2,534 | 0.1% | 14.3% |
| Italian | 12,716 | 2,420 | 0.1% | 16.0% |
| Nepali, Marathi, or other Indic languages | 11,986 | 3,502 | 0.1% | 30.4% |
| Ukrainian or other Slavic languages | 11,393 | 2,474 | 0.1% | 39.8% |
| Urdu | 10,475 | 3,210 | 0.1% | 37.5% |
| Other languages of Asia | 10,403 | 2,495 | 0.1% | 46.4% |
| Telugu | 7,458 | 2,419 | 0.1% | 7.0% |
| Gujarati | 7,097 | 1,801 | 0.1% | 24.5% |
| Serbo-Croatian | 7,039 | 2,101 | 0.1% | 21.5% |
| Polish | 6,493 | 2,157 | 0.1% | 18.7% |
| Punjabi | 5,889 | 2,051 | 0.1% | 30.7% |
| Haitian | 4,976 | 2,734 | 0.1% | 11.7% |
| Tamil | 4,817 | 1,701 | 0.1% | 20.6% |
| Swahili or other languages of Central, Eastern, and Southern Africa | 4,645 | 1,838 | 0.1% | 18.7% |
| Malayalam, Kannada, or other Dravidian languages | 4,566 | 1,778 | <0.1% | 14.7% |
| Yiddish, Pennsylvania Dutch or other West Germanic languages | 4,528 | 1,161 | <0.1% | 7.7% |
| Greek | 4,015 | 1,144 | <0.1% | 25.7% |
| Hmong | 776 | 941 | <0.1% | — |
| Other Native languages of North America | 689 | 629 | <0.1% | — |
| Navajo | 149 | 175 | <0.1% | — |
How we counted
Most figures in this post come from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS) 2024 1-year estimates, table B16001, “Language Spoken at Home by Ability to Speak English for the Population 5 Years and Over,” for Los Angeles County and the City of Los Angeles. The share of Armenian speakers comes from the same table for the United States. The metro comparison uses the 2024 1-year version of table C16001 for every metro area with at least a million residents, and the San Gabriel Valley figures (Alhambra, Arcadia, Monterey Park, Rosemead, San Gabriel and Temple City) use the 2020 to 2024 5-year version of C16001, because the detailed table isn’t published for cities that size. The language counts come from the Census Bureau’s 2015 release CB15-185 and from the Los Angeles Almanac‘s account of Professor Ivanov’s count.
A few things to keep in mind. The ACS asks which language a person speaks at home, not how well they speak that language or whether they can read it, and “speaks English less than very well” is a self-reported answer (often one person answering for the whole household), not a test score. The survey also groups some languages together: every variety of Chinese is counted as “Chinese (incl. Mandarin, Cantonese),” and Eastern and Western Armenian are counted as one. Every number is an estimate from a sample, with margins of error at the 90 percent confidence level; where two languages sit within each other’s margin (Persian and Vietnamese, for instance), treat them as tied. We updated this post in October 2026 to replace figures from an earlier version that were out of date or wrongly attributed.
Los Angeles speaks all of these languages, and you can learn several of them here without leaving the county. We run Spanish classes in Los Angeles, along with French, Italian and German, taught by native speakers who live in the city.
