Data View: Language Diversity in New York State

New Yorkers speak over 800 languages. About 30% (5.8 million) of New Yorkers speak a language other than English at home. Of them, around 2.5 million don’t speak, write, or understand English very well (also called limited English proficiency or LEP). This can make it difficult to access important government programs and services.

To make sure all New Yorkers can access government services and benefits— no matter how well you communicate in English— Governor Kathy Hochul signed New York State’s language access policy into law and created the state’s Office of Language Access. The Office of Language Access (OLA), within the Office of General Services (OGS), is responsible for ensuring that New York State agencies covered under this law implement it efficiently and effectively.

This dashboard seeks to better inform anyone looking to further understand the New York population who speaks a language other than English at home and has LEP. Seeking to empower data-driven decisions around language access, the OGS Data Analytics Office has collaborated with OLA to develop this dashboard. It will be updated annually with the latest data available. The last update to this dashboard was made in November 2024. In it, you can easily visualize:

• The top languages spoken by people with LEP across New York State. These were determined using American Community Survey (ACS).
• The top languages spoken by people with LEP in each New York State county. Data was processed by the OGS Data Analytics Office to present estimates by county instead of the original public use microdata areas (or “PUMA”).

This dashboard can be used for demographic analysis to help plan how to better provide language access services by understanding where groups of language speakers are located, proportion of populations with LEP within the state or a county, or other important intersectional characteristics of this population, like age group, education level, birthplace and more. This dashboard is meant as an informative point of reference. Users should remember the information is based on estimates and not exact figures. Furthermore, we invite users to always think of the people and individual experiences represented by this data.

For assistive technology users experiencing issues with the Tableau dashboard, please download the Excel summary here, or use the Download Data Summary button below.

In August 2025, OLA partnered with OGS’s Data Analytics Office and Digital and Media Services Center to host two live dashboard demo sessions for New York State Language Access Coordinators and community-based organizations. The sessions demonstrated how to navigate the language dashboard and utilize the features and available data to enhance language access services across New York State. The following video is a recording of one of the sessions.

If you would like to learn more about the dashboard in languages other than English, please contact OLA at [email protected].