Many Americans speak not only English

06 July 2003 · 0 comments

[Via William Z. Shetter's Language Miniature #115, Many Americans speak not only English]: English is the overwhelmingly dominant language of the U.S., but the country has always been home to a great variety of languages. These have at least a million adult speakers: Spanish 31,000,000, Chinese 2,000,000, French 1,600,000 (includes Cajun), German 1,400,000 , Tagalog [...]

[Via William Z. Shetter's Language Miniature #115, Many Americans speak not only English]: English is the overwhelmingly dominant language of the U.S., but the country has always been home to a great variety of languages.

These have at least a million adult speakers: Spanish 31,000,000, Chinese 2,000,000, French 1,600,000 (includes Cajun), German 1,400,000 , Tagalog 1,200,000, Vietnamese 1,000,000, Italian 1,000,000.

Here are a few others that are spoken by over a hundred thousand people: Korean 900,000, Russian 700,000, Polish 667,000, Arabic 600,000, Portuguese 582,000, Japanese 478,000, Greek 365,000, Navajo 178,000 (plus 200,000 other Native N. American languages), Yiddish 139,000.

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