Speaking in tongues.

• Author: Potenza, Alessandra
• Position: NATIONAL

Nearly 400 languages are spoken in the U.S. What's the most common one in your state, not including English and Spanish?

It's often referred to as a "melting pot" of cultures, but the U.S. is a melting pot of languages too: Nearly 400 are spoken here, according to the Census Bureau.

The U.S.--a country of more than 300 million people--has no official language. Though 230 million people only speak English, 21 percent of Americans speak a second language at home, mostly Spanish.

This map shows the most commonly spoken languages in each state, not including English and Spanish. Some categories--like Pacific Island languages--aren't broken down by individual language.

You'll find languages like German, French, and Polish because of the long history of European migration to the U.S. (From 1815 to 1915 alone, some 30 million Europeans arrived here.)

Languages like Vietnamese, Tagalog, and Hmong took hold more recently. Asian immigration increased after the removal in 1965 of quotas that favored European immigration and after the end of the Vietnam War in 1975.

"The immigrant population [in the U.S.] is extremely diverse, perhaps the most diverse in the world," says Jeanne Batalova of the Migration Policy Institute. "It means that the United States is becoming multilingual."

CHINESE: Chinese immigrants first arrived on the West Coast in the 1800s, during the Gold Rush. They were key to the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad in the 1860s. Today, Chinese is spoken by 3 million people in the U.S., and most Chinese speakers live in California.

NATIVE AMERICAN LANGUAGES: There are 169 Native American languages spoken by nearly 370,000 people in the U.S. Navajo is the most common, followed by Dakota. The languages are endangered because...