Why language diversity matters in healthcare


50 different languages other than English are spoken throughout the U.S. in daily healthcare encounters, says the inaugural edition of the Healthcare World Language Index published by AMN Healthcare Language Services, a provider of healthcare language interpretation services. Based on assessing 110 million minutes of interpretation services, the top 10 languages other than English used in patient/healthcare provider encounters nationally are:

LanguagePercent used
1. Spanish74%
2. Vietnamese3.8%
3. American Sign Language3.6%
4. Arabic3.5%
5. Mandarin3.0%
6. Russian1.8%
7. Cantonese1.7%
8. Portugese1.2%
9. Haitian Creole1.0%
10. Korean0.9%
Source: AMN Healthcare 2021 Healthcare World Language Index

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s