Quote:
Originally Posted by Acajack
What is surprising to me is relatively low numbers for basically all languages except Spanish.
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Yeah, in a country of 330 million, the only non-Spanish language to hit over 1% of the population would be all varieties of Chinese put together at 3.5 million.
Essentially, if you are a speaker of anything other than English or Spanish
at home (and maybe one of the Chinese languages, depending on how they mutually understand one another), less than 1 in 100 Americans share your situation. For even many of the world's languages Russian, French, Arabic, German etc., given that the number of speakers is around 1 million stateside, it's like 1 in 200 to 300 people who share your linguistic upbringing in the US. Which does seem kind of low.
Of course, the languages are obviously clustered together geographically. But the stats make me realize why some (especially non-urban, or non-majorly Hispanic area) Americans are so unused to hearing another language around, and why some people bristle at hearing a non-English conversation in the public sphere and perceive it as "not American" (not saying it's justified).
I guess it's just my bias, being very urban in upbringing and having spent nearly all my life in cities (and this is only in the US and Canada I'm talking about; I've not really lived anywhere like Europe where multilingualism is common) where overhearing conversations by strangers in a motley mix of tongues on the bus, on the phone, or in the mall is part and parcel of daily life.
Despite not really being natively fluent in any language other than English, I've never found it strange or "un-American" or "un-Canadian" to be surrounded by a multitude of languages around me, be it by co-workers, classmates, or people at the doctor's office.