Culture of the United States: English by custom, official only since 2025

Which languages Americans speak at home

The federal government has always worked mainly in English, but by custom. Congress has never declared a statutory official language. Thirty-two states have laws giving English official or co-official status, and three states and most territories recognise English together with one or more other languages: Hawaiian is an official language under the constitution of Hawaii, and Spanish has official status in Puerto Rico and New Mexico. In 2025 Executive Order 14224 declared English the official language of the United States, and federal agencies now treat it as official under that order.

The Census Bureau's American Community Survey measures what people actually speak. In 2019, 241 million people spoke only English at home, about a quarter more than in 1980, and 67.8 million, almost one in five, spoke another language. Spanish accounted for 62% of those, a share the Census Bureau puts at 12 times greater than the next four most common languages, Chinese, Tagalog, Vietnamese and Arabic. More than half of Spanish speakers, 55%, were born in the United States.

More than 300 languages besides English have native speakers in the country, about 150 of them Indigenous languages still living, and New York City alone has speakers of up to 800. Many Native languages are no longer spoken, while Hawaiian has survived beside the English of the islands.

Where Americans' ancestors came from

The first colonial society was mostly English. In the colonies of 1700, which held about 250,000 people, the English were the largest group, and at the first census in 1790 they made up 60% of the white population, beside Scotch-Irish, German, Irish, Scots, Dutch, Welsh, French and Swedish settlers. African culture arrived through slavery, and African Americans and their descendants are among the foundations of the country's culture. Spanish and French settlers were among the colonial founders too, and Hispanic cultures have been strong in some regions since colonial times.

Later waves came from Germany across much of the country, from Ireland and Italy to the Northeast, from Japan to Hawaii, and in recent decades from Latin America, Asia and the Caribbean, which has become the source of the country's largest Black immigrant group. The foreign-born share of the population is projected to reach 19% by 2060.

The flow slowed sharply in 2025. The Census Bureau estimated that net international migration fell from 2.7 million to 1.3 million between the year to June 2024 and the year to June 2025, so that the population grew by only 1.8 million, or 0.5%, against 3.2 million and 1.0% the year before.

The cultural geographer Colin Woodard divides the country into as many as eleven regional cultures that grew from its settlement history, from the Puritan Yankeedom of New England to the Deep South and the Far West. The South is often called the Bible Belt for the weight of evangelical Protestantism in its culture.

What Americans believe

Pew Research Center's Religious Landscape Study found in 2023 and 2024 that 62% of adults identified as Christians, down from 71% in 2014 and 78% in 2007. The decline has slowed: between 2019 and 2024 the Christian share held between 60% and 64%. The religiously unaffiliated, atheists, agnostics and those who say they are nothing in particular, rose from 16% in 2007 to 29%, and have also levelled off.

Practice has held up better than identity. In the same survey 44% of adults said they pray at least once a day, 33% attend services at least monthly, and 79% believe in something spiritual beyond the natural world. Age divides the country: 43% of the youngest adults have no religion, against 13% of the oldest. Baptists remain the largest Protestant family at 12% of adults, members of historically Black Protestant churches make up 5%, and Latter-day Saints 2%.

The map has regions of its own. Church attendance is higher in the South than elsewhere, the Northeast is mostly mainline Protestant and Catholic, the Mormon Corridor runs through Utah and southern Idaho, and the West is relatively secular: 34% of Vermont's residents are non-religious, against 6% in Alabama.

What American food is built on

American cooking grew from European cuisine, the foods of Native American and Alaskan peoples, and the African American cooking known as soul food. Many of its signature dishes are local versions of other traditions: the hamburger, the hot dog, American pizza and Southern fried chicken derive from immigrants' recipes and home-grown invention. Proximity to Mexico and the annexation of former Mexican land produced Tex-Mex and New Mexican cooking, and regional traditions such as Cajun cooking in Louisiana and Pennsylvania Dutch cooking belong to particular ethnic groups.

Holidays have their own dishes, above all the turkey of Thanksgiving. Recent immigrants eat much as they did at home, and Americanised versions of their food, Chinese American and Italian American cooking among them, follow. More than half of adults drink at least one cup of coffee a day. American fast-food chains, which pioneered the drive-through in the 1940s, have outlets around the world, and health officials link frequent fast food to what they call an obesity epidemic.

How American sports developed their own games

The country's main team sports are largely its own. Professional baseball dates from 1869 and had no close rival until the 1960s, and it is still called the national pastime. American football grew out of college athletics in the late nineteenth century. Ice hockey has long been part of the culture of the Great Lakes and New England and spread south from the early 1990s as the National Hockey League expanded. Soccer is widely played by young people, and Major League Soccer runs thirty teams from March to October.

Women's sport is strong by international standards, a fact usually credited to Title IX, the anti-discrimination law that requires most colleges to fund men's and women's sports equally.

How American writers found their own voice

Colonial authors read John Locke and the other Enlightenment philosophers, and the revolutionary period left political writing by Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson. Newspapers spread in the same years to meet the demand for an anti-British national literature. William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy, an early American novel, appeared in 1789. In the first half of the nineteenth century the critic John Neal attacked writers such as Washington Irving for imitating the British, and influenced Edgar Allan Poe, who took poetry and the short story in new directions. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller started the Transcendentalist movement, and Henry David Thoreau wrote Walden under its influence.

Slavery gave the century its sharpest books. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote against it, and Frederick Douglass was among the authors of slave narratives. Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter of 1850 and Herman Melville's Moby-Dick of 1851 looked at the dark side of the country's past, and Walt Whitman, Melville and Emily Dickinson were the leading poets of what is called the American Renaissance. Mark Twain was the first major American writer born in the West, and Henry James won an international readership with novels such as The Portrait of a Lady.

After the Great Migration moved Black Southerners to northern cities, the writers of the Harlem Renaissance built a literature of their own that condemned inequality and celebrated Black culture, and it influenced French-speaking writers of the African diaspora in the 1930s. In the 1950s many authors tried to write the Great American Novel, while the Beat Generation rejected that conformity and wrote about drugs, sex and the failings of society. Twelve American writers have won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Painting followed a similar path away from Europe. The Hudson River School of the mid-nineteenth century worked in the tradition of European naturalism, and the Armory Show of 1913 in New York, an exhibition of European modernist art, shocked the public and changed American art. Georgia O'Keeffe and Marsden Hartley worked out an American modernism, and the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and the pop art of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein developed largely in the United States. Frank Lloyd Wright, Philip Johnson and Frank Gehry became known around the world as architects.

Who pays for American culture

The federal government has no ministry of culture. Congress founded the Smithsonian Institution in 1846 as a federal trust for education and research, and it runs museums, research centres and the National Zoological Park. In 1965 Congress set up the National Endowment for the Arts, which helps communities with art projects and arts education, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, which funds museums, historic sites, schools, universities, libraries, researchers and public media. The Library of Congress, the National Gallery of Art and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting also have cultural duties, and many states and cities have departments of cultural affairs. The country's political values, drawn from the Revolution and the Enlightenment, put weight on liberty, individualism and limited government.

Private effort fills much of the gap. Alexis de Tocqueville noted the American habit of helping others in need as early as 1835, and the law puts that habit to work: many minor crimes are punished with hours of community service, which requires the offender to do volunteer work.

Where American music and film come from

African American music is the root of most American popular music. The Smithsonian Institution says there would be no American music without African-American influences. Jazz developed early in the twentieth century with musicians such as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington; country music took shape in the 1920s and rhythm and blues in the 1940s, both from the blues and old-time folk music. Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley and Little Richard were among the first rock and roll performers in the mid-1950s, and Bob Dylan came out of the folk revival of the 1960s.

Hollywood, a district of Los Angeles, is the centre of American film production, and its studios make films for a world audience. The classical Hollywood style developed between 1913 and 1969, and The Jazz Singer of 1927, a musical with synchronised sound, led the move to talking pictures. Television reached 96.7% of households; ownership peaked at 98.4% in the 1996 to 1997 season. On the stage, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwrights such as Lorraine Hansberry, August Wilson and Tony Kushner wrote about American society. The country originated stand-up comedy and modern improvisational theatre, built on suggestions from the audience. The minstrel show of the nineteenth century, with white actors in blackface caricaturing Black speech and music, is now recognised as racist, and tap dancing and stand-up comedy both have roots in it.

Blue jeans, sold as work clothes in the 1850s by Levi Strauss, a German-Jewish immigrant merchant in San Francisco, were taken up by teenagers a century later and are worn in every state by people of every age and class.