From the Bayou, We Speak
Spanish
¡Hola!Spanish is Houston's most widely spoken language after English, and Hispanic Houstonians are now the region's largest group. You'll hear it in every corner of the city.
Houston Diversity
A city that speaks in many languages
On any given day you can hear Spanish at a taquería, Vietnamese along Bellaire Boulevard, Mandarin and Cantonese in Chinatown, and Korean on Long Point Road. These are the numbers behind that sound.
By the numbers
One of the most linguistically diverse places in the country
145+languages and dialects spoken across the Houston region[1]
40.1%of residents age 5 and older speak a language other than English at home[1]
23.9%of people in the Houston metro area were born outside the U.S.[1]
#2U.S. metro area for Vietnamese Americans, tied with San Jose[2]
~1 in 4Houston residents spoke limited English in 2015[3]
Our five languages
The languages in this collection
Each one has a home in Houston. Here is where you might hear it.
Vietnamese
Xin chào!Houston has one of the largest Vietnamese communities in the United States, with restaurants, markets and temples clustered around Bellaire Boulevard in Southwest Houston.
Chinese
你好！Houston's Chinatown stretches along Bellaire Boulevard in Southwest Houston, where Mandarin, Cantonese and many other Chinese languages share the same blocks.
Korean
안녕하세요!Long Point Road in Spring Branch is known as Houston's Koreatown, home to Korean restaurants, bakeries, churches and businesses.
English
Hello!English is the language our students are learning together, and the bridge that carries these poems to many of their readers.
From our Instagram
Untranslatable
Some words carry a whole feeling. These are a few we keep coming back to.
Beyond the data
What the numbers don't show
A statistic can count speakers. It can't tell you what it feels like to order coffee in a language you are still learning, or to read a poem in the language your grandmother sang in.
That is what the poems on this site are for.
Sources
- Greater Houston Partnership analysis of U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey data, reported by Houston First, October 2023. houstonfirst.com
- Pew Research Center, top 10 U.S. metropolitan areas by Vietnamese population, based on the 2017–2019 American Community Survey. pewresearch.org
- From the Bayou, We Speak project proposal (2015 figure). Updated figures will be added as new census data is released.