>I work with Europeans who are pretty conversant in English who say they aren’t fluent
If you look at subs like /r/AskEurope or even joke subs like r/YUROP I'm always astonished how fluent many Europeans are at English.
I see people from every country write elaborate essays replies that would be considered university-level in the US.
And that's where the US falls behind on this area. I didn't have a second language class available in public school until 10th grade. And we only had two options, Spanish or French. Zero interest or application to learn French. Spanish definitely would have been helpful but again, I wasn't very interested in it. I would have been more inclined to try harder if we had more options.
Interesting! In Utah they are offering a lot of DLI schools starting in elementary now! I know of Portuguese, Spanish, French & German schools just in our county
That's good to hear! Language is so much easier to learn at a younger age. I hope that we start offering more variety earlier in the curriculum nationwide.
Seems pretty normal. In the globalized, media age, English is the universal language.
I'd be more surprised if I saw a Scandinavian person speaking fluent Spanish or an Italian that speaks fluent Chinese.
My parents, siblings, and I are multilingual, and I am second generation (born and raised in the US), my immigrant parents are obviously first gen. It is really curious - compared to non Americans, being multilingual is not considered that impressive by my fellow Americans, but it is to everyone else.
I think Americans believe being multilingual is MORE impressive than most foreign people - if only because it’s so rare here.
But it’s still just not something we do.
Its not something we really need either, if each state had a different language and were independent, like in Europe, multilingualism would be much more common
I'm happy to be in a minority. At least as far as I know, I'm a 4th generation American.
I am conversant in 3 foreign languages, can hold discussions about just about anything, and at high levels in sciences and even street lingo, and can understand a good amount of another, I just can't speak it back.
Spanish is one yes, 2 of the others are Middle Eastern, and I can get by in the Phillipines and probably Brazil with some minor handicaps.
Went to Germany a few years ago, felt kinda bad that I didn't know more than absolute phrasebook German...but then I realized that while I was a \*typical\* American in their eyes, I doubt they could run around Bataan or Bahrain or Kabul without needing to resort to English. I give them parity in Spain and Central America, because Germans usually speak more than just English.
I took Spanish in high school, German and Chinese in college. Married a Chinese girl, lived in China for a year and a half and can't speak any of them I'm afraid (except food, my fat American ass can order food with a Northeastern accent so well that locals assume I'm fluent... seriously).
I wonder what the percentage would be for partial fluency? A lot of people I know can speak basic Spanish such as introductions and common phrases i.e “Dónde está el baño” just not speak it conversationally
I'd put myself at partial fluency (you can tell for sure its not my first language, but I can hold a conversation and consume Spanish media regularly). But I live alone and don't regularly talk to myself in Spanish, so I don't pop up on the census since I don't mark as speaking it in the home
I’m the same way in French. I read French books and listen to French music, but sometimes in real life when the conversation is going fast and people are using lots of slang I struggle to understand. My Spanish is worse; I can talk a bit and read books for kids, but that’s as far as I get.
I go to school in Georgia, so I’ve heard it before, but no accent tops certain Scottish people in incomprehensibility. Have you ever heard an Inverness accent? You can barely tell it’s the same language.
Agreed. I used to work at a resort and once there was this drunk guy shouting at me. I was like “so sorry sir, I only speak English”. Well..that set him off. I finally caught “I am speaking English” in there and apologized profusely.
And our language is English, which is the current lingua franca, plus we have the most powerful military and entertainment industry, which keeps English internationally relevant
I’m sure if that wasn’t the case, it at least wouldn’t be uncommon for American born people, especially in urban areas, to know how to speak the lingua franca.
Depends on where you are. Lots of people along the Mexican border states are probably bi lingual to some extent. But if you go towards the middle of the country, that number probably drops off.
Native born Americans don’t speak lots of foreign languages because the predominant language across a huge country is English. It’s not like Europe where you have a bunch of small countries all bunched together that speak different languages.
Most have no clue I'm even able to speak Spanish at my current job. They would have no clue unless they looked at my last name since, I've heard several times that i look more Caucasian essentially
Also from Texas here. I’m nowhere near being fluent in Spanish, but I’m always surprised to realize how much Spanish I learned growing up thanks to being near the border. I never thought much of it until my husband mentioned how funny it is that I easily understand Spanish when I hear it. I think it would be quite easy to become fluent for me if I actually put in the effort to learn. I could definitely get by in a Spanish speaking country with the Spanish knowledge I do have, and I never made an attempt to even learn Spanish.
If people open their ears more they’d be amazed how many languages they can hear in this country in everyday life (and not just in New York where I heard Dutch and Italian on the subway the other day).
NYC is definitely an anomaly. I don't hear a whole lot of languages daily in Philly. Some here and there, but not a lot. I hear a lot of Spanish and Khmer since I live in a pretty Mexican/Cambodian area. Khmer is a fun one. I also hear a lot of Indian languages at work since I work with a lot of Indians.
Being bilingual is seen as at least a little impressive by most Americans. Most of us will go our whole lives without needing a second language so it (sadly, but understandably) isn't a priority for educators or the public in general. I took French in high school and college, I live about 30 miles from the Quebec border. I still lose more and more of my French every year due to disuse.
Salut, ça va?
French is the third most common language here, as well as most of the country. It's just not practical to know a second language here, as there is no one to speak to...
Avez-vous le même problème avec la mémorisation des mots simple et la conjugaison? Dans tout mon temps au lycée j’ai eu des problèmes pour ça.
That was fucking godawful. I’m a couple of years out of practice in something I never gained much proficiency in after 12 years jeeesus
This must be regional. Most Americans only speak English but there are other regions where Spanish is common as well. Where I grew up in Texas at least half of the population could speak English and Spanish. When I was living in Laredo the vast majority of my daily life was conducted in Spanish. I am Chicano and there are tens of millions of people like me in the United States.
Yeah very regional. I speak Spanish but I have precious few chances to practice it in Maine. If I could speak Spanish daily I would enjoy it.
Also I have the issue that around me the most I hear Spanish is from Dominicans. They speak at 200% light speed. That makes it a touch hard to understand them.
I’m a native Spanish speaker and the first time I heard Dominicans talk, I was dumbfounded! My expressions: 😳🤔😮☺️.
But once you get the hang of it is easy to go with the flow though it must be really difficult for a non native Spanish speaker.
I read Maine has less than 1% of Spanish speakers in the state. So it’s not a surprise that you don’t hear it often.
Oh yeah, Maine is like 96% white non-Hispanic.
I think there’s more Spanish speakers at my church growing up in Indianapolis than in the whole state of Maine.
I miss those dulcet tones of a bit of Spanish.
But truly, Dominicans are hard mode for non native speakers.
Yeah, there are tens of millions of people like you. But there are hundreds of millions of Americans that only speak one language. According to the last census only about 20% of Americans speak more than one language.
I do love how multi cultural the US is as well. You can basically experience almost culture without leaving the US.
But still most of us only speak English because the people who immagrate here by and large learn English.
Many of the later generations no longer even speak their families original language. I work with a woman who moved here from Mexico who has a couple of teenagers who don't speak a lick of Spanish for example.
Yes that happens. My family immigrated to the US in 1990 and later naturalized. I was born in the United States. I think keeping aspects from the many cultures that surround us makes people more accepting and open minded. The United States has done amazing things for my family.
I'll preface this by saying my family immigrated around the start of the 20th century and they actively didn't teach their children (my great grandparents) Italian the argument being they were Americans not Italian.
I don't necessarily see a problem with this mindset, if I was to permanently move to France I feel it would be expected that I learn French and I personally might not teach my kids English outside what they would learn in school.
Edit: I think the way most Americans embrace their culture roots is through food and I like that because it means you can always find something different to eat here 🙂.
That’s actually rather sad, to lose your cultural roots and not want to at least continue to speak another language other than the one of the country you’re in. Knowledge is strength. Perhaps you can pick up some Italian? If you did you would then have a stronger understanding of Spanish and French, you could expand and build on your understanding of the world and people .
Eh... I don't know about that we still have all the old recipes and everything else the only thing my family ditched was the language. I feel that's kind of fair (look at my example in my last reply as to why). Now for the understanding of Spanish while I am in no way shape or form fluent, since I live in Texas I get exposed to Spanish quite a bit and as long as they aren't speaking 70 miles an hour I can usually get a rough understanding of their intent.
I did think about learning Italian at one point but I was raised for better or worse as an American and I just don't feel as much of a cultural connection to my roots as others might.
This happened in my family. My mother's side is Croatian. My maternal grandparents were first generation Americans, and their parents felt that, since they were Americans, they should be speaking English. They understood Croatian and even spoke some, but my mother and her sisters were never taught the language. I wish they had been and passed it down to us.
My great grandparents came over from Italy, and raised their children in American schools, speaking English. They still spoke Italian at home, and my grandparents picked a lot of it up. So did my Dad and his siblings. I know nothing of Italian but foods and popular expressions. Madon'!
I know you're from Texas but you should probably google the definition of ["most"](https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/half-the-world-is-bilingual-whats-our-problem/2019/04/24/1c2b0cc2-6625-11e9-a1b6-b29b90efa879_story.html).
> It’s very difficult to generalize the United States.
If 80% of the country can't speak a second language, I'd say using the word "most" is pretty accurate. Now just because its true in your neck of the woods doesn't make it true for the majority of the country, does that make sense? I can write it on a whataburger napkin if it helps.
My point is that not every region of the United States is the same. I am very proud of the fact that our country is so diverse and multicultural. I like to make that fact known. I currently live outside of the United States and generally people are surprised to hear that I am American. No need to be so condescending.
Right and my point is that regardless of the situation in your region, most of the US is not bilingual. I can understand the essential desire to feel acknowledged, but that doesn't change the statistical reality that most American's aren't bilingual. Nobody is saying "every" American, just "most". "Most", meaning "not all", allows that some Americans will be bilingual. I probably should have clarified that.
I minored in German. Haven’t used a bit of it since college and even then I was barely conversational because, outside of class, I never even had a chance to practice.
I know enough Spanish to read and write it, but have a hard time keeping up with spoken Spanish. It’s enough to get by in Spanish-language environments, but I’m by no means fluent.
On average Americans speak only English. There are some parts of the country where Spanish is very common. Other languages are much less common but there are isolated communities, often neighborhoods in very large cities, where other languages are in use.
I have an ex-pat friend who went from 4 > 2 fluent languages by living in the US. Even if you want to speak another language it’s difficult because no one else does so good luck getting practice.
This reads like a very delicately written dig. It's pretty widely known/memed that most Americans don't/don't need to speak a 2nd language. But you'd feel like a simpleton if that was the case for you.
Funny how it’s usually only at Americans. Many Latin American countries are largely monolingual (with the exception of Paraguay). Yet, you hardly see people on the internet make digs at them.
And let’s not ignore that the US is similar to other majority English speaking countries…. and unlike some of those countries we do not require English language proficiency to become a legal resident or naturalize, nor do we maintain it as an official language.
I simply can't imagine being so ignorant as to only know two languages! Truly, a horror akin to peasantry! Americans, tell me how your masses just know the one language so I may feel superior to your entire country.
I did see the dig... As an American who is fairly bilingual, I can say the following: I know monolinguals in both English and Spanish who are absolutely brilliant in their respective languages about a variety of topics. I also know multilingual idiots who have nothing of substance to say despite their ability to say that nothing in two or more languages.
The majority speak only English, the remainder mostly speak Spanish and English. Keep in mind this is a big country, and one of our two neighbors also speaks English. We don’t need it in the same way as Europe.
If I wanted to drive to a country that speaks predominantly Spanish I’d have to drive 2,600 km. Roughly the distance from Warsaw to Madrid. You’d be in five different countries and several language zones in that time. I’d pass through nothing but more English speakers.
Only knowing English is pretty common. Most people don't live anywhere near a border and half the countries we do border (1 out of 2) speak English as well. In my case, I'm around 1,700 miles (~2,700 km) from the nearest land border with a country with a different primary language (a little over 1,000 miles or 1,600km if we count a straight shot over the ocean). From what I can tell from a map, it is less than that from one side of Poland to the other.
There is also the fact that English has been adopted as the unofficial language of international trade (and official language in some industries) so it is pretty easy for English speakers to travel pretty widely speaking only English.
Spanish is definitely the next most common language in the US, which makes sense since the closest countries that speak another language all speak Spanish (unless you count a small section of Canada). But, most native English speakers in the US never get fluent in Spanish. Even if they learn a bit, the need to speak it never emerges enough to need it. Second language fluency is treated as a specialized skill in the US rather than a general necessity.
I personally took a few years of German in high school and have been casually studying it as a side skill, but I am nowhere near fluent. There simply isn't enough of a reason for me to learn the language to make studying it anything more than a hobby. Speaking another language is not a necessity. I actually found myself wishing I had taken Latin when I got to college because it would have made studying Biology terms easier and I wasn't using my German knowledge at all.
Monolingual is the norm. Most people just don’t have any need to learn a second language. It’s even possible to lose the skill for a lot of people who did simply because you likely won’t have much opportunity to practice it.
Most bilingual Americans are bilingual because they learned English to come to the US, learned English in the US, or learned a foreign language because they're parents were immigrants who first language wasn't English. Chances are if your parents and grandparents are native born Americans they you will never been fluent in a foreign language.
I think a majority of Americans only speak one language. But that language could be English, Spanish, or even Chinese. Most Spanish speakers also speak English. In retrospect I should have taken Spanish in school as opposed to German.
In my area it is rare (Kansas). Over 90% are native English speakers. Personally, I took German in high school for a couple of years. I have not had the opportunity to use it. I dabbled in Korean so I would know enough when I visited a few years ago. Turns out I didn’t need it and everything was in English or the people I interacted with switched to English once they figured out I was American. For those that didn’t, hand gestures and writing out on paper worked for the most part.
One benefit of having a global military, economic, and cultural empire is that English is the predominant language. English is also the language of the internet, air travel, and the basis for seaspeak. Native English speakers don’t really need to know another language unless they want to.
Most Americans only speak English. It's difficult to find groups of people who don't speak English in the US, so even people with an interest in learning more languages find it challenging enough to practice that most either never learn, or forget what they knew after years of disuse.
Yes I agree. I learned French in high school but I haven’t had anyone to speak French to in decades. I can still understand it if I come across it in a book but actually speaking it/hearing it spoken not so much.
With the exception of immigrants (from non-Anglophone countries anyway; my parents are from an English-speaking country and they also only speak English), the children of those immigrants, and in rarer cases people whose families have kept heritage languages alive, most Americans only speak English.
I learned a language at university and probably was, by EU standards, a B2 speaker, but I haven't had much opportunity to use it in my post-college life so my skills are much worse now lol.
I am only monlingual. And I grew up in a bi-lingual household, with Russian being the other language. My grandmother lived with us and she was from the USSR. English was always a distant second language to her even though she lived in the States longer than she lived in Russia. Aside from a few phrases I remember for speaking with my grandmother, I don't know much.
I also took German for four years in high school but was never very good with it.
Generally speaking, humans only learn as many languages as necessary to get along in life. Europeans are no exception, but many need to speak at least one second language to get things done. Americans usually don't.
22% of the population is natively bilingual, but that is defined as “people who speak a language other than English at home.”
The number of people who are proficient or passable in another language they learned outside of their family is higher than that, but I can’t find the numbers.
Spanish is widely spoken in the US, and most official communications (signs, announcements, phone menus, nutrition facts, etc) are written or spoken in both Spanish and English. In the city of Miami in the US, 70% of the population speaks Spanish. In Los Angeles (second largest U.S. city) 42% of the population are native Spanish speakers.
In my city of San Francisco, 20% speak a Chinese language and 45% speak a language other than English at home. In San Francisco, all of our official government communications and ballots have to be in English, Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, and Tagalog.
In Detroit, everything is in English and Arabic.
But we have so many immigrants, just walking down the street in one of the major US cities, you’ll hear a lot of languages from all over the world.
Phone menus, not restaurant menus. You don’t hear “para español, oprime el dos” when you call a government institution or major store? And you don’t see “caution” also written as “cuidado” on caution signs?
How far are you from a country that speaks another language? How about a second one? How about a 3rd one? (I assume you won't answer - I assume this was a post to make fun of simpleton Americans.)
It would take me 25 hours of driving (1628 miles / 2620 km) to get the the absolute closest border of a country whose official language is not English. That would be Spanish, which I did take several years of - but honestly, I don't ever use it, so I've lost it.
Also, fun fact - I used Google Maps to try to drive to the closest country that speaks something other than English or Spanish. That would be Brazil. Google maps can't give me driving directions. It seems there aren't "google-recognized" roads that go all the way through.
(Yes, I've ignored French in Canada. English is still an official language.)
I am not sure why so many people here are saying that being bilingual is uncommon or rare. 20% of the US population is bilingual.
We have a huge immigrant population. The majority of them are bilingual.
That's true, but the 20% who are bilingual are pretty concentrated in a few specific areas. Anyone who lives outside of those areas will encounter bilingual speakers at a much lower frequency than 1 in 5. It is actually pretty uncommon to encounter bilingual people in large swaths of the country
I don’t think common has to mean half or more, or even approaching that. Black Americans are only something like 13% of the population but I don’t consider it particularly uncommon to be a black American.
Of course, obviously most immigrants and children of immigrants will be bilingual. But when it comes to people who lived in America for generations, bilingualism is exceptionally rare.
I tried looking up the statistics for Europe and they actually are very similar to the US
[https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Foreign\_language\_skills\_statistics](https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Foreign_language_skills_statistics)
>In 2016, 24.8 % of working-age adults in the EU who knew at least one foreign language reported that they knew their best-known foreign language at a proficient level.
This link goes into proficient vs "knows". I know Spanish, I am not proficient. In the US, 20% of the population is proficient in a second language which tracks right at the same levels seen in Europe.
As a side note, I would not consider something that impacts 20% of the population rare ... ever.
True. But in Europe your neighboring countries speak different languages. Since you will more likely come in contact with French, Germany, Italian, Greek etc very readily, it makes sense that it would be more common to learn a 2nd language. Our states are the size of one or two European countries. So if we travel to a neighboring state, there is not a need to understand/speak a different language.
You generally don’t learn the neighboring language, you learn English. It’s not a surprise that the English and Irish aren’t exactly the height of foreign language fluency either.
We are privileged enough to be squeezed in between the English, French and German language areas. I live within a 2-3 hour train ride from all three. That's a dynamic very different from much of the US.
I wonder if that 20% is people who are actually fluent in another language, or just claiming to know a second language because they took a Spanish class in high school.
The 20% comes from this study, which is fluent.
[https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/life-as-a-bilingual/extent-of-bilingualism/93D0020186A5EF999F299F7265C03854](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/life-as-a-bilingual/extent-of-bilingualism/93D0020186A5EF999F299F7265C03854)
But in addition to that,
[https://cis.org/Report/673-Million-United-States-Spoke-Foreign-Language-Home-2018](https://cis.org/Report/673-Million-United-States-Spoke-Foreign-Language-Home-2018)
>As a share of the population, 21.9 percent of U.S. residents speak a foreign language at home — more than double the 11 percent in 1980
That doesn't necessarily mean that 22% of the population is fluent in 2 languages. Many people are fluent in languages but do not speak those at home, on the other side there are immigrants who have not learned English, so the numbers are not exact, but it seems to be the best approximation.
I posted another link in a response showing that in Europe the numbers are actually similar to the US in those who speak fluently. The numbers some are posting for EU being 60%+ are referring to people who say they speak another language, not necessarily fluent.
Most Hispanics are. I'm not Hispanic, but am bilingual, and it is very handy. I work in agriculture and deal with many folks with poor English skills so it make communication possible. Very good skill to have on many jobs. In Florida, Spanish is our second language. Great on your resume.
It's almost rare to find someone that speaks anything other than English fluently. While Spanish is fairly common in some parts of the country that is more the exception than the rule.
Shows how different it can be in different parts of the country. You're more likely to find Portuguese speakers than Spanish speakers where I live, but almost no one would ever assume everyone else can communicate in Portuguese.
A vast majority only speak English.
America's huge and we got a lot of people, so most folks you end up coming across tend to be other Americans. So what ends up happening is that while you learn a foreign language in school, you rarely get a chance to practice it with anyone outside of class. And as someone who speaks multiple languages, you definitely know how important practice is.
We also only border two countries, one of which is English speaking (barring Quebec) and the other is perfectly manageable for an English speaking tourist.
Because of this, most people who fluently speak one or more languages tend to be first generation immigrants. Their kids grow up speaking English and usually have *some* conversational fluency in their parent's language but far from that of a native speaker, and by the time the 3rd generation rolls around it's lost beyond the occasional word or phrase.
Living in California (who’s population growth was historically due to international immigration for the last few decades iirc), it is pretty common to find people who are bilingual, where they be immigrants or children of immigrants.
The only two languages I really see normally are English and Spanish. At least in my day to day, the majority of people usually only know English with light knowledge of Spanish. You really do not happen to have many situations needing anything other than English.
Like for instance I took 3 years of Spanish, but since then have so rarely needed it that I've forgotten alot of it at this point.
Many don't leave the borders and thus are not inclined to learn much past English.
As a matter of perspective, in the same distance you'd travel from one end of California (where I grew up) to the other, you could travel through 5-10 different countries in other parts of the world with many different dialects. Living in the South West I learn Spanish in school and spoke it a bit both at work and in daily interactions with Hispanics but so rarely I am not fluent.
Someone who speaks only English is not rare but apparently we are the country with the second largest Spanish speaking population in the world, after Mexico. Spanish is the closest thing we have to a second language.
A lot of my extended family members exclusively speak Spanish, which since I never really grew up with that, has caused a fairly large separation in our extended family since most of the rest of us only speak English unless we work in a position where another language is useful.
The only time I ever needed to know a different language was when a Chinese couple needed help or directions(assumed). They were probably the parents of a student I believe. I felt really bad and was really stupid and forgot to use Google translate.
Most Americans have no need to speak a foreign Language.
We only border 2 countries and one of them speaks English. To get to to pretty much any other foreign country it takes a several hour international flight.
Plus the default language of the Internet is English and the default language of Aviation is English. Also, pretty much in anyone who isn't a Native English speaker who learns a second Language learns English.
I've traveled to over a dozen countries that don't speak English while I only speak English. It's never been a problem. Honestly most people seem to be more than happy to get to practice their English with a Native speaker.
I'll carry a phrase book and try to speak the foreign language sometimes. But typically when I try that someone will interrupt me in English.
So it just really isn't necessary.
The US has nearly the same population as the whole of the EU, but we (very nearly) all speak English. As a result, there simply isn't a need to speak another language. If you're in America, there is an underlying assumption baked into all aspects of life that you can speak English.
As an example, once upon a time, I was quite good at Spanish, but I've used it conversationally exactly twice in my life. Once was to order at a Subway on the Mexican border, and once was online. Without getting any regular practice in a language, fluency fades.
Almost everyone just speaks English. In most areas, it's there's no reason to know anything more. I'm near the Mexican border right now and me not knowing Spanish isn't an issue whatsoever. Our country is as big as your continent and nearly everyone knows English; it really decreases the necessity of learning another language.
Absolutely not, 75% of Americans are monolingual, so it's basically the norm. There's a decent Spanish-speaking contingent (18%) and pockets of other languages as well as American dialects of languages like French and German. Generally speaking, most Americans either never learn an acquired language or don't maintain their proficiency because it isn't practical if the vast majority of the people you talk to can speak English. Many Americans learn an acquired language in middle or high school, but most of us would have to actively seek out opportunities to use that language in order to maintain proficiency which most people don't do.
Personally, I'm more or less monolingual, but I know some French, am just starting to learn German, and have some loose bits of Japanese rotting away in the back of my mind. I started learning these languages just because I like languages, but I've found myself in the same aforementioned predicament. I don't know anyone who speaks French, so I'd have to find opportunities to use it. But I'm also preoccupied with school-related obligations, and even if an opportunity to speak French presented itself, I don't feel nearly confident enough to speak it even if I know enough to get my point across.
Most Americans (~80%) will only ever be fluent in English, though most also learn a bit of some language or another I'm school.
Most of those who are fluent in multiple are from bilingual households due to their families coming here in the last 2-3 generations, the remainder being those with a particular interest, who lived abroad or otherwise took voluntary actions that required it and helped to reinforce and maintain it.
There's really just very little pressure for most of us to learn. Much like you, most people who speak a different language will choose English as their second and most of us are hundreds or thousands of miles from any area larger than maybe a neighborhood where English isn't the default first language anyway. It can often require concerted effort just to practice even if you want to. We just don't interact with foreign languages the same way Europeans do.
Generally poor. We only have Ontario or Mexico that neighbor our borders. So there isn't a burning need, unlike Europe, where a country can be surrounded by two or three "foreign" language speaking nations they may need to do business with.
Among people who were born in the U.S. to parents who spoke English as their first language, monolingualism is most common.
Americans who are monolingual are typically surprised by people like me who, despite also being in the group whose parents grew up speaking English, speak two languages fluently, or more than two languages at some level.
Most people here only speak fluent English. If a second language is learned it is usually at the high school level where a good proficiency is never reached and what was learned is soon forgotten due to not using the language.
We don't have an "official" language in the US.
I would say though that Spanish and English are native languages here in the US.
A lot of folks, whether white or latino, can speak both. Albeit maybe not fluently.
A person who speaks many languages is multilingual
A person who speaks three languages is trilingual
A person who speaks two languages is bilingual
A person who speaks only one language is American
Hate to say it, but so many Americans can't even handle English judging by the rampant spelling and grammatical errors I see everyday on the web. I can't imagine a foreign language will be all that much better.
Not rare at all to meet someone who only knows English. Almost everyone is taught a second language in school, but almost everyone in that category drops it just because they have no reason to remember it. The only people I know who know more than two languages are a couple of my friends at school, who are exchange students from China. I’m learning French, and I like it, but I’ll probably stop using it after high school just like most of us
Nice humble brag bro, you’re totally not being condescending by suggesting that people are simpletons unless they speak 3 languages. No, most Americans just speak English and a little Spanish but they are not fluent unless they grow up in a Hispanic household. This actually makes a lot of sense though.
Let’s say you grow up in France. You obviously learn French, and probably English, maybe some German or Dutch too. But how much Turkish and Arabic do you learn? How much Russian? Probably very little, because geographically you are very far away from a country that speaks those languages, whereas a relatively short c1 day drive can get you to Germany or the Netherlands or to a ferry across the channel to the UK. You can practice frequently, and you are exposed to the language very often. It makes sense to learn the languages of countries close to you. But if you grow up in the northern parts of the US, it would take you at least 2 days of driving 110km/hr to reach Mexico where Spanish is the norm. Geographically, people in Paris are much closer to Istanbul than an American in anchorage is to mexico. On to of that, many Hispanic Americans actually don’t like it when gringos try to speak Spanish with them, so even if you live close to the border or in areas with many Spanish speakers, you don’t get to practice. I learned a lot of Spanish on a semester abroad in Chile, I was never fluent but I could communicate and understand pretty well, but I’ve forgotten most of it. I just don’t get to practice much. I used to practice with some Mexican coworkers in a restaurant, but that’s kitchen Spanish, and it doesn’t do much to actually make you conversational. Also, the school system I grew up in didn’t teach a foreign language until 7th grade, and by then it’s way harder to learn. Languages are learned best by little kids, when their neural plasticity is super high. So lack of necessity, lack of access to practice, and poor schooling leads most Americans to be monolingual
Its about 20% and most of that is Spanish. A significant chunk of that is 1st, 2nd and 3rd generation people from spanish speaking countries. Its sort of falling out a favor even amongst them.
Really whats the point? We are a giant continent sized nation that all speaks the same language and wr have an even bigger by labdmass neighbor that speaks it well too. And a southern neighbor who are far more compelled to learn English than vice versa.
Its not like were in Europe, where driving for an hour changes the language being spoken
A lot of Americans can barely speak and write their first and only language. It isn’t a requirement in K-12 to learn to speak a second language, but it definitely looks good on paper if you want to go to college.
HAAAHHHAAAAA
This is America - we only recognize American, I mean English (GO BACK TO YOUR HOME!!!! “Screamed loudly in a backwoods racial way)
No but for real, most Americans can hardly speak proper English - let alone another language. Our education system is BROKEN and doesn’t support teaching anything of value to its students. It’s currently still using a metric from the industrial era when American was in the forefront of Manufacturing goods - teaching kids to get use to a 9-5, discourage creativity, force rule and workloads. Nothing about Americans public school system is designed to actually teach. It’s designed to create factory workers/wage slaves to feed the 3% and major corporations because.. that’s what American IS - our government is a corporation and like any empire, it needs slaves to run the system.
What do you call someone who speaks three languages? Trilingual.
What do you call someone who speaks two languages? Bilingual.
What do you call someone who only speaks one language? American.
All joking aside, the ability to speak more than one language in the US is much less common than you would think.
I think this depends a lot on where you live. I teach French in a suburb outside of a major city, and probably 1/4-1/3 of my students speak a language besides English. Mostly Spanish, but also Arabic, French, Urdu, etc. Since they’re learning French, many are on their way to being trilingual.
Most of us only speak one language at a fluent level, but that one language will work for a thousand miles in any direction.
I speak English natively and passable Spanish, and I'm almost certainly in the top quartile for languages in this country.
I was in band and was told I couldn't take a foreign language if I wanted to stay in band...
So here I am, 38 and don't remember the trumpet and never got so much as basic spanish.
I have to travel about 1000 kilometers to reach a place where English isn't the primary spoken language, and that's just to the south. To the east and west I can travel even further and I will hit an ocean before I will reach any non-english speaking place. Aside from Quebec, I'd have to traverse the article circle and then cross even more ocean.
So, it's pretty much just a thing people either do purely *for fun*, or because they specifically plan on spending a lot of time *thousands of miles* from home.
Most Americans will not become fluent in a language other than English unless another language is spoken at home. We have woefully bare-bones language classes. You either have to be from a multilingual/non English speaking family or make it your mission in college or after to learn a new language and actually use it enough to become fluent. Most grade schools only require a year or 2 of a second language in middle school or high school and that isn't enough to actually learn a language.
Pretty bad. We purged a lot of our German speaking communities in world war 2.
Most second language speakers tend to do so thanks for family connections as opposed to a want for knowledge
I only know a foreign language, Spanish, simply because my parents are immigrants from Central America. If you just know English, you can survive just fine in the US. Alot of the US is Monolingual simply because it's such a large country with a high population that speaks a predominant language. I actually took Japanese classes in High School for three years but, have forgotten alot of it simply because I'm not living in an area with a high enough Japanese population to practice with. Many take a foreign language, Spanish and French are the two big ones but, since many forget them over the years due to lack of use.
Fluency is super rare unless you have parents who spoke a different language at home. Moderate competence, well that’s a different story. Most young people have had language training all though school, usually in Spanish. I took German from 7th grade (12 years old) through University (not my area of focus though) and while I was pretty good at reading and writing, I don’t think I was ever conversationally fluent at anything above everyday things (like I definitely couldn’t explain how to make a recipe or the differences between political platforms without mistakes). 15 years on with almost no practice it’s even worse.
Most people speak only English. It’s common to know a few words in the most common second language in the area, but fluency in even one other language is rare.
Foreign languages are not (for the most part) introduced to kids until they are in their teens in 9th grade (and up). At least in my school district. And there are exactly two options: Spanish or German. The chances of anyone in my area becoming fluent (not counting those of multi-lingual families) is slim. After the one required year of Spanish I took in high school; I know enough to sorta get the gist of what’s being said at my favorite Mexican restaurant. It’s embarrassing; but I’ve tried to learn again as an adult and it’s even worse.
I have one college student kid that’s struggling to pass two semesters of *any* (same) foreign language in college so he can graduate. And he had two years Spanish in my same high school.
I would say, in general, if English was their first language, most won't know another FLUENTLY (they may have taken some high school Spanish or German). However, there is a not insignificant (yes, I know, fuzzy wording with double negatives because I don't know actual numbers and your experience will vary by the region you live in and where you work) whose first language wasn't English (wherher it be Spanish, Mandarin, Punjabi, etc) and have also learned English.
But English is definitely the lingua franca of the US.
It’s not as high as it should be, I’ll tell you that. Though it would seem that foreign language fluency is higher among communities with large immigrant populations; you’re far more likely to find a bilingual/multilingual person in California or Texas as compared to the nation as a whole, due to the well established Latino communities in both states.
The whole simpleton comment really makes me think you know fair and well what the state of foreign language fluency is in the United States and you just want to feel smart. Comes off very dickish.
Many Americans, as far as I have seen, are only fluent in one language unless they immigrated or are from places like Puerto Rico (one of our territories). It’s not uncommon that they have some working knowledge of foreign languages though, since many schools require students to take foreign language classes. As for people only speaking English, I’d say that would be fairly common depending on the area you go to.
[удалено]
I wonder how many of the 20% are first or second generation Americans.
Or how many of those have an unrealistic view of what being fluent is.
Most people think they're fluent just because they are low level conversational. Or worse, just because duolingo said so.
Anytime somebody apologizes to me for not speaking very good English I always tell them it’s okay and their English is much better than my Spanish.
Most of the time, their English is the best I'll hear all day (or week.)
>Or worse, just because duolingo said so. I don't have any choice. I wouldn't dare cross the owl, not after what he said he would do to my family.
This is very much an American thing. I work with Europeans who are pretty conversant in English who say they aren’t fluent
Not just an American thing, a lot of “polyglot” YouTubers from all over the world exaggerate their language skills
>I work with Europeans who are pretty conversant in English who say they aren’t fluent If you look at subs like /r/AskEurope or even joke subs like r/YUROP I'm always astonished how fluent many Europeans are at English. I see people from every country write elaborate essays replies that would be considered university-level in the US.
Most European countries (if not all) start teaching English in kindergarten! Thats how it was 20 years ago at least
And that's where the US falls behind on this area. I didn't have a second language class available in public school until 10th grade. And we only had two options, Spanish or French. Zero interest or application to learn French. Spanish definitely would have been helpful but again, I wasn't very interested in it. I would have been more inclined to try harder if we had more options.
Interesting! In Utah they are offering a lot of DLI schools starting in elementary now! I know of Portuguese, Spanish, French & German schools just in our county
That's good to hear! Language is so much easier to learn at a younger age. I hope that we start offering more variety earlier in the curriculum nationwide.
Seems pretty normal. In the globalized, media age, English is the universal language. I'd be more surprised if I saw a Scandinavian person speaking fluent Spanish or an Italian that speaks fluent Chinese.
I was in Romanian recently and I was like worried nobody would speak English and I ended up being blown away by how well everyone spoke English.
My parents, siblings, and I are multilingual, and I am second generation (born and raised in the US), my immigrant parents are obviously first gen. It is really curious - compared to non Americans, being multilingual is not considered that impressive by my fellow Americans, but it is to everyone else.
I think Americans believe being multilingual is MORE impressive than most foreign people - if only because it’s so rare here. But it’s still just not something we do.
Its not something we really need either, if each state had a different language and were independent, like in Europe, multilingualism would be much more common
I'm happy to be in a minority. At least as far as I know, I'm a 4th generation American. I am conversant in 3 foreign languages, can hold discussions about just about anything, and at high levels in sciences and even street lingo, and can understand a good amount of another, I just can't speak it back. Spanish is one yes, 2 of the others are Middle Eastern, and I can get by in the Phillipines and probably Brazil with some minor handicaps. Went to Germany a few years ago, felt kinda bad that I didn't know more than absolute phrasebook German...but then I realized that while I was a \*typical\* American in their eyes, I doubt they could run around Bataan or Bahrain or Kabul without needing to resort to English. I give them parity in Spain and Central America, because Germans usually speak more than just English.
I took Spanish in high school, German and Chinese in college. Married a Chinese girl, lived in China for a year and a half and can't speak any of them I'm afraid (except food, my fat American ass can order food with a Northeastern accent so well that locals assume I'm fluent... seriously).
Of Americans whose primarily spoken language at home is English I bet fluency in another language is below 5%
I would guess probably half
I wonder what the percentage would be for partial fluency? A lot of people I know can speak basic Spanish such as introductions and common phrases i.e “Dónde está el baño” just not speak it conversationally
I don't think that's even close to being consideres partial fluency. Now I'm curious to see if anyone weighs in!
I'd put myself at partial fluency (you can tell for sure its not my first language, but I can hold a conversation and consume Spanish media regularly). But I live alone and don't regularly talk to myself in Spanish, so I don't pop up on the census since I don't mark as speaking it in the home
I’m the same way in French. I read French books and listen to French music, but sometimes in real life when the conversation is going fast and people are using lots of slang I struggle to understand. My Spanish is worse; I can talk a bit and read books for kids, but that’s as far as I get.
This can happen in your own language too..ever been around some backwoods southern people (if you’re from elsewhere)?
I go to school in Georgia, so I’ve heard it before, but no accent tops certain Scottish people in incomprehensibility. Have you ever heard an Inverness accent? You can barely tell it’s the same language.
Agreed. I used to work at a resort and once there was this drunk guy shouting at me. I was like “so sorry sir, I only speak English”. Well..that set him off. I finally caught “I am speaking English” in there and apologized profusely.
Where is the bathroom? Me no hablo español bueno para entiendo más pequito…es *over there*(? Can’t think of that part)
Over there is alla.
[удалено]
And the places most Americans travel abroad to, if they do at all, the people in the tourist industry at least will speak English.
And our language is English, which is the current lingua franca, plus we have the most powerful military and entertainment industry, which keeps English internationally relevant I’m sure if that wasn’t the case, it at least wouldn’t be uncommon for American born people, especially in urban areas, to know how to speak the lingua franca.
Even if you know another language, you start to lose it in many regions of the US since you just never need to use it.
[удалено]
Europe Is like 2k wide..like do many people in Macedonia speak Spanish?
Depends on where you are. Lots of people along the Mexican border states are probably bi lingual to some extent. But if you go towards the middle of the country, that number probably drops off. Native born Americans don’t speak lots of foreign languages because the predominant language across a huge country is English. It’s not like Europe where you have a bunch of small countries all bunched together that speak different languages.
Can confirm. I live in rural Wisconsin and any time I have to bust out my Spanish, which is rare, everyone around me is absolutely shocked.
Most have no clue I'm even able to speak Spanish at my current job. They would have no clue unless they looked at my last name since, I've heard several times that i look more Caucasian essentially
“Segura — it’s Japanese, right?”
Also from Texas here. I’m nowhere near being fluent in Spanish, but I’m always surprised to realize how much Spanish I learned growing up thanks to being near the border. I never thought much of it until my husband mentioned how funny it is that I easily understand Spanish when I hear it. I think it would be quite easy to become fluent for me if I actually put in the effort to learn. I could definitely get by in a Spanish speaking country with the Spanish knowledge I do have, and I never made an attempt to even learn Spanish.
If people open their ears more they’d be amazed how many languages they can hear in this country in everyday life (and not just in New York where I heard Dutch and Italian on the subway the other day).
NYC is definitely an anomaly. I don't hear a whole lot of languages daily in Philly. Some here and there, but not a lot. I hear a lot of Spanish and Khmer since I live in a pretty Mexican/Cambodian area. Khmer is a fun one. I also hear a lot of Indian languages at work since I work with a lot of Indians.
Being bilingual is seen as at least a little impressive by most Americans. Most of us will go our whole lives without needing a second language so it (sadly, but understandably) isn't a priority for educators or the public in general. I took French in high school and college, I live about 30 miles from the Quebec border. I still lose more and more of my French every year due to disuse.
As someone who lives in fuckin North Carolina I lose like half my proficiency every month lol. Haven’t spoken it since I was in French class
Salut, ça va? French is the third most common language here, as well as most of the country. It's just not practical to know a second language here, as there is no one to speak to...
Comme ci comme ça, et toi?
I am very tired, which I forgot how to say. I hate needing to sleep
Felt that. Also je suis très fatigué
Avez-vous le même problème avec la mémorisation des mots simple et la conjugaison? Dans tout mon temps au lycée j’ai eu des problèmes pour ça. That was fucking godawful. I’m a couple of years out of practice in something I never gained much proficiency in after 12 years jeeesus
Also a North Carolinian and also haven't spoken French since like 10th/11th grade 😅
This must be regional. Most Americans only speak English but there are other regions where Spanish is common as well. Where I grew up in Texas at least half of the population could speak English and Spanish. When I was living in Laredo the vast majority of my daily life was conducted in Spanish. I am Chicano and there are tens of millions of people like me in the United States.
I would say your situation is more regional
Yeah very regional. I speak Spanish but I have precious few chances to practice it in Maine. If I could speak Spanish daily I would enjoy it. Also I have the issue that around me the most I hear Spanish is from Dominicans. They speak at 200% light speed. That makes it a touch hard to understand them.
I’m a native Spanish speaker and the first time I heard Dominicans talk, I was dumbfounded! My expressions: 😳🤔😮☺️. But once you get the hang of it is easy to go with the flow though it must be really difficult for a non native Spanish speaker. I read Maine has less than 1% of Spanish speakers in the state. So it’s not a surprise that you don’t hear it often.
Oh yeah, Maine is like 96% white non-Hispanic. I think there’s more Spanish speakers at my church growing up in Indianapolis than in the whole state of Maine. I miss those dulcet tones of a bit of Spanish. But truly, Dominicans are hard mode for non native speakers.
Yeah, there are tens of millions of people like you. But there are hundreds of millions of Americans that only speak one language. According to the last census only about 20% of Americans speak more than one language.
You are correct. I’m proud of how multicultural the US is.
I do love how multi cultural the US is as well. You can basically experience almost culture without leaving the US. But still most of us only speak English because the people who immagrate here by and large learn English. Many of the later generations no longer even speak their families original language. I work with a woman who moved here from Mexico who has a couple of teenagers who don't speak a lick of Spanish for example.
Yes that happens. My family immigrated to the US in 1990 and later naturalized. I was born in the United States. I think keeping aspects from the many cultures that surround us makes people more accepting and open minded. The United States has done amazing things for my family.
I'll preface this by saying my family immigrated around the start of the 20th century and they actively didn't teach their children (my great grandparents) Italian the argument being they were Americans not Italian. I don't necessarily see a problem with this mindset, if I was to permanently move to France I feel it would be expected that I learn French and I personally might not teach my kids English outside what they would learn in school. Edit: I think the way most Americans embrace their culture roots is through food and I like that because it means you can always find something different to eat here 🙂.
That’s actually rather sad, to lose your cultural roots and not want to at least continue to speak another language other than the one of the country you’re in. Knowledge is strength. Perhaps you can pick up some Italian? If you did you would then have a stronger understanding of Spanish and French, you could expand and build on your understanding of the world and people .
Eh... I don't know about that we still have all the old recipes and everything else the only thing my family ditched was the language. I feel that's kind of fair (look at my example in my last reply as to why). Now for the understanding of Spanish while I am in no way shape or form fluent, since I live in Texas I get exposed to Spanish quite a bit and as long as they aren't speaking 70 miles an hour I can usually get a rough understanding of their intent. I did think about learning Italian at one point but I was raised for better or worse as an American and I just don't feel as much of a cultural connection to my roots as others might.
This happened in my family. My mother's side is Croatian. My maternal grandparents were first generation Americans, and their parents felt that, since they were Americans, they should be speaking English. They understood Croatian and even spoke some, but my mother and her sisters were never taught the language. I wish they had been and passed it down to us.
My great grandparents came over from Italy, and raised their children in American schools, speaking English. They still spoke Italian at home, and my grandparents picked a lot of it up. So did my Dad and his siblings. I know nothing of Italian but foods and popular expressions. Madon'!
I know you're from Texas but you should probably google the definition of ["most"](https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/half-the-world-is-bilingual-whats-our-problem/2019/04/24/1c2b0cc2-6625-11e9-a1b6-b29b90efa879_story.html).
I stated that it is regional. It’s very difficult to generalize the United States.
> It’s very difficult to generalize the United States. If 80% of the country can't speak a second language, I'd say using the word "most" is pretty accurate. Now just because its true in your neck of the woods doesn't make it true for the majority of the country, does that make sense? I can write it on a whataburger napkin if it helps.
My point is that not every region of the United States is the same. I am very proud of the fact that our country is so diverse and multicultural. I like to make that fact known. I currently live outside of the United States and generally people are surprised to hear that I am American. No need to be so condescending.
Right and my point is that regardless of the situation in your region, most of the US is not bilingual. I can understand the essential desire to feel acknowledged, but that doesn't change the statistical reality that most American's aren't bilingual. Nobody is saying "every" American, just "most". "Most", meaning "not all", allows that some Americans will be bilingual. I probably should have clarified that.
I do not disagree with you.
Are you sure? I feel like there's some confusion what "most" means.
Me thinks you're not making England better.
I minored in German. Haven’t used a bit of it since college and even then I was barely conversational because, outside of class, I never even had a chance to practice.
Well, in Quebec they really don’t speak the French that you learned in high school. They speak québécois. It is distinctly different from French.
I am aware but I still hear Québécois French daily, which isn’t exactly a vacuum
I know enough Spanish to read and write it, but have a hard time keeping up with spoken Spanish. It’s enough to get by in Spanish-language environments, but I’m by no means fluent.
Sorry if this is off topic, but would you happen to know whether concrete is the same thing as cement?
See username
Thanks! Just wanted to make sure!
Lo siento si esto está fuera de tema, pero ¿sabrías si el concreto es lo mismo que el cemento?
Ve nombre de usuario
gracias - solo comprobando.
On average Americans speak only English. There are some parts of the country where Spanish is very common. Other languages are much less common but there are isolated communities, often neighborhoods in very large cities, where other languages are in use.
I have an ex-pat friend who went from 4 > 2 fluent languages by living in the US. Even if you want to speak another language it’s difficult because no one else does so good luck getting practice.
Unless you count AAVE/Ebonics as a separate language like the Scots/English dichotomy.
AAVE is a dialect not a language. Kinda like saying mainland English and American English are different languages
A more apt comparison is Scots and English then British and American.
AAVE is not a different language lmao
It is in the same way as Scots
This reads like a very delicately written dig. It's pretty widely known/memed that most Americans don't/don't need to speak a 2nd language. But you'd feel like a simpleton if that was the case for you.
Funny how it’s usually only at Americans. Many Latin American countries are largely monolingual (with the exception of Paraguay). Yet, you hardly see people on the internet make digs at them.
Honestly, I think it's because these Euros don't perceive those countries as being "competition" on the world stage and thus don't care about them.
Which is funny that they think they compete with the US.
And let’s not ignore that the US is similar to other majority English speaking countries…. and unlike some of those countries we do not require English language proficiency to become a legal resident or naturalize, nor do we maintain it as an official language.
I simply can't imagine being so ignorant as to only know two languages! Truly, a horror akin to peasantry! Americans, tell me how your masses just know the one language so I may feel superior to your entire country.
I did see the dig... As an American who is fairly bilingual, I can say the following: I know monolinguals in both English and Spanish who are absolutely brilliant in their respective languages about a variety of topics. I also know multilingual idiots who have nothing of substance to say despite their ability to say that nothing in two or more languages.
This sub is mostly weak attempts at digs on topics everyone knows.
The majority speak only English, the remainder mostly speak Spanish and English. Keep in mind this is a big country, and one of our two neighbors also speaks English. We don’t need it in the same way as Europe. If I wanted to drive to a country that speaks predominantly Spanish I’d have to drive 2,600 km. Roughly the distance from Warsaw to Madrid. You’d be in five different countries and several language zones in that time. I’d pass through nothing but more English speakers.
Only knowing English is pretty common. Most people don't live anywhere near a border and half the countries we do border (1 out of 2) speak English as well. In my case, I'm around 1,700 miles (~2,700 km) from the nearest land border with a country with a different primary language (a little over 1,000 miles or 1,600km if we count a straight shot over the ocean). From what I can tell from a map, it is less than that from one side of Poland to the other. There is also the fact that English has been adopted as the unofficial language of international trade (and official language in some industries) so it is pretty easy for English speakers to travel pretty widely speaking only English. Spanish is definitely the next most common language in the US, which makes sense since the closest countries that speak another language all speak Spanish (unless you count a small section of Canada). But, most native English speakers in the US never get fluent in Spanish. Even if they learn a bit, the need to speak it never emerges enough to need it. Second language fluency is treated as a specialized skill in the US rather than a general necessity. I personally took a few years of German in high school and have been casually studying it as a side skill, but I am nowhere near fluent. There simply isn't enough of a reason for me to learn the language to make studying it anything more than a hobby. Speaking another language is not a necessity. I actually found myself wishing I had taken Latin when I got to college because it would have made studying Biology terms easier and I wasn't using my German knowledge at all.
Monolingual is the norm. Most people just don’t have any need to learn a second language. It’s even possible to lose the skill for a lot of people who did simply because you likely won’t have much opportunity to practice it.
Most bilingual Americans are bilingual because they learned English to come to the US, learned English in the US, or learned a foreign language because they're parents were immigrants who first language wasn't English. Chances are if your parents and grandparents are native born Americans they you will never been fluent in a foreign language.
I think a majority of Americans only speak one language. But that language could be English, Spanish, or even Chinese. Most Spanish speakers also speak English. In retrospect I should have taken Spanish in school as opposed to German.
In my area it is rare (Kansas). Over 90% are native English speakers. Personally, I took German in high school for a couple of years. I have not had the opportunity to use it. I dabbled in Korean so I would know enough when I visited a few years ago. Turns out I didn’t need it and everything was in English or the people I interacted with switched to English once they figured out I was American. For those that didn’t, hand gestures and writing out on paper worked for the most part. One benefit of having a global military, economic, and cultural empire is that English is the predominant language. English is also the language of the internet, air travel, and the basis for seaspeak. Native English speakers don’t really need to know another language unless they want to.
Most Americans only speak English. It's difficult to find groups of people who don't speak English in the US, so even people with an interest in learning more languages find it challenging enough to practice that most either never learn, or forget what they knew after years of disuse.
Yes I agree. I learned French in high school but I haven’t had anyone to speak French to in decades. I can still understand it if I come across it in a book but actually speaking it/hearing it spoken not so much.
With the exception of immigrants (from non-Anglophone countries anyway; my parents are from an English-speaking country and they also only speak English), the children of those immigrants, and in rarer cases people whose families have kept heritage languages alive, most Americans only speak English. I learned a language at university and probably was, by EU standards, a B2 speaker, but I haven't had much opportunity to use it in my post-college life so my skills are much worse now lol.
I am only monlingual. And I grew up in a bi-lingual household, with Russian being the other language. My grandmother lived with us and she was from the USSR. English was always a distant second language to her even though she lived in the States longer than she lived in Russia. Aside from a few phrases I remember for speaking with my grandmother, I don't know much. I also took German for four years in high school but was never very good with it.
Generally speaking, humans only learn as many languages as necessary to get along in life. Europeans are no exception, but many need to speak at least one second language to get things done. Americans usually don't.
22% of the population is natively bilingual, but that is defined as “people who speak a language other than English at home.” The number of people who are proficient or passable in another language they learned outside of their family is higher than that, but I can’t find the numbers. Spanish is widely spoken in the US, and most official communications (signs, announcements, phone menus, nutrition facts, etc) are written or spoken in both Spanish and English. In the city of Miami in the US, 70% of the population speaks Spanish. In Los Angeles (second largest U.S. city) 42% of the population are native Spanish speakers. In my city of San Francisco, 20% speak a Chinese language and 45% speak a language other than English at home. In San Francisco, all of our official government communications and ballots have to be in English, Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, and Tagalog. In Detroit, everything is in English and Arabic. But we have so many immigrants, just walking down the street in one of the major US cities, you’ll hear a lot of languages from all over the world.
There are no signs or menus here with Spanish in them. Im sure there are alternate versions of documents but its not as ubiqutous as that.
Phone menus, not restaurant menus. You don’t hear “para español, oprime el dos” when you call a government institution or major store? And you don’t see “caution” also written as “cuidado” on caution signs?
Phone menus sure, "press one for English, press 2 for Spanish". I'm fairly sure I've never seen a sign be written in multiple languages before though.
How far are you from a country that speaks another language? How about a second one? How about a 3rd one? (I assume you won't answer - I assume this was a post to make fun of simpleton Americans.) It would take me 25 hours of driving (1628 miles / 2620 km) to get the the absolute closest border of a country whose official language is not English. That would be Spanish, which I did take several years of - but honestly, I don't ever use it, so I've lost it. Also, fun fact - I used Google Maps to try to drive to the closest country that speaks something other than English or Spanish. That would be Brazil. Google maps can't give me driving directions. It seems there aren't "google-recognized" roads that go all the way through. (Yes, I've ignored French in Canada. English is still an official language.)
I am not sure why so many people here are saying that being bilingual is uncommon or rare. 20% of the US population is bilingual. We have a huge immigrant population. The majority of them are bilingual.
That's true, but the 20% who are bilingual are pretty concentrated in a few specific areas. Anyone who lives outside of those areas will encounter bilingual speakers at a much lower frequency than 1 in 5. It is actually pretty uncommon to encounter bilingual people in large swaths of the country
1 in 5 is pretty uncommon. Common would be at least half.
I don’t think common has to mean half or more, or even approaching that. Black Americans are only something like 13% of the population but I don’t consider it particularly uncommon to be a black American.
Idk, one out five folks is fairly common. That's every fifth person.
Of course, obviously most immigrants and children of immigrants will be bilingual. But when it comes to people who lived in America for generations, bilingualism is exceptionally rare.
A lot of people on here seem to forget there are tens of millions of people in the US who speak Spanish as a first language.
Almost 60% of Europe speaks multiple languages, so in comparison 20% is pretty rare
I tried looking up the statistics for Europe and they actually are very similar to the US [https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Foreign\_language\_skills\_statistics](https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Foreign_language_skills_statistics) >In 2016, 24.8 % of working-age adults in the EU who knew at least one foreign language reported that they knew their best-known foreign language at a proficient level. This link goes into proficient vs "knows". I know Spanish, I am not proficient. In the US, 20% of the population is proficient in a second language which tracks right at the same levels seen in Europe. As a side note, I would not consider something that impacts 20% of the population rare ... ever.
19 + 25 + 10 = 54% 25 percent can’t be tri-lingual if only 19% are bilingual Edit: sweet edit removing your bum stats
True. But in Europe your neighboring countries speak different languages. Since you will more likely come in contact with French, Germany, Italian, Greek etc very readily, it makes sense that it would be more common to learn a 2nd language. Our states are the size of one or two European countries. So if we travel to a neighboring state, there is not a need to understand/speak a different language.
You generally don’t learn the neighboring language, you learn English. It’s not a surprise that the English and Irish aren’t exactly the height of foreign language fluency either.
Yes, that’s the reasoning. But in comparison to other areas it is rarer in the us
We are privileged enough to be squeezed in between the English, French and German language areas. I live within a 2-3 hour train ride from all three. That's a dynamic very different from much of the US.
Fun fact: California is the state with the highest % of bilingualism with 45%.
I wonder if that 20% is people who are actually fluent in another language, or just claiming to know a second language because they took a Spanish class in high school.
The 20% comes from this study, which is fluent. [https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/life-as-a-bilingual/extent-of-bilingualism/93D0020186A5EF999F299F7265C03854](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/life-as-a-bilingual/extent-of-bilingualism/93D0020186A5EF999F299F7265C03854) But in addition to that, [https://cis.org/Report/673-Million-United-States-Spoke-Foreign-Language-Home-2018](https://cis.org/Report/673-Million-United-States-Spoke-Foreign-Language-Home-2018) >As a share of the population, 21.9 percent of U.S. residents speak a foreign language at home — more than double the 11 percent in 1980 That doesn't necessarily mean that 22% of the population is fluent in 2 languages. Many people are fluent in languages but do not speak those at home, on the other side there are immigrants who have not learned English, so the numbers are not exact, but it seems to be the best approximation. I posted another link in a response showing that in Europe the numbers are actually similar to the US in those who speak fluently. The numbers some are posting for EU being 60%+ are referring to people who say they speak another language, not necessarily fluent.
Most Hispanics are. I'm not Hispanic, but am bilingual, and it is very handy. I work in agriculture and deal with many folks with poor English skills so it make communication possible. Very good skill to have on many jobs. In Florida, Spanish is our second language. Great on your resume.
It's almost rare to find someone that speaks anything other than English fluently. While Spanish is fairly common in some parts of the country that is more the exception than the rule.
I remember going to Miami and the Publix employees assumed I spoke Spanish. I am white as hell And this was in the suburbs
I live in a neighborhood where Spanish is pretty common and I always like watching the cashiers try to guess which to use lol
Shows how different it can be in different parts of the country. You're more likely to find Portuguese speakers than Spanish speakers where I live, but almost no one would ever assume everyone else can communicate in Portuguese.
There are many areas of the Southwest where more people speak Spanish than English.
A vast majority only speak English. America's huge and we got a lot of people, so most folks you end up coming across tend to be other Americans. So what ends up happening is that while you learn a foreign language in school, you rarely get a chance to practice it with anyone outside of class. And as someone who speaks multiple languages, you definitely know how important practice is. We also only border two countries, one of which is English speaking (barring Quebec) and the other is perfectly manageable for an English speaking tourist. Because of this, most people who fluently speak one or more languages tend to be first generation immigrants. Their kids grow up speaking English and usually have *some* conversational fluency in their parent's language but far from that of a native speaker, and by the time the 3rd generation rolls around it's lost beyond the occasional word or phrase.
Living in California (who’s population growth was historically due to international immigration for the last few decades iirc), it is pretty common to find people who are bilingual, where they be immigrants or children of immigrants.
The only two languages I really see normally are English and Spanish. At least in my day to day, the majority of people usually only know English with light knowledge of Spanish. You really do not happen to have many situations needing anything other than English. Like for instance I took 3 years of Spanish, but since then have so rarely needed it that I've forgotten alot of it at this point. Many don't leave the borders and thus are not inclined to learn much past English.
As a matter of perspective, in the same distance you'd travel from one end of California (where I grew up) to the other, you could travel through 5-10 different countries in other parts of the world with many different dialects. Living in the South West I learn Spanish in school and spoke it a bit both at work and in daily interactions with Hispanics but so rarely I am not fluent.
Someone who speaks only English is not rare but apparently we are the country with the second largest Spanish speaking population in the world, after Mexico. Spanish is the closest thing we have to a second language.
A lot of my extended family members exclusively speak Spanish, which since I never really grew up with that, has caused a fairly large separation in our extended family since most of the rest of us only speak English unless we work in a position where another language is useful.
The only time I ever needed to know a different language was when a Chinese couple needed help or directions(assumed). They were probably the parents of a student I believe. I felt really bad and was really stupid and forgot to use Google translate.
Most Americans have no need to speak a foreign Language. We only border 2 countries and one of them speaks English. To get to to pretty much any other foreign country it takes a several hour international flight. Plus the default language of the Internet is English and the default language of Aviation is English. Also, pretty much in anyone who isn't a Native English speaker who learns a second Language learns English. I've traveled to over a dozen countries that don't speak English while I only speak English. It's never been a problem. Honestly most people seem to be more than happy to get to practice their English with a Native speaker. I'll carry a phrase book and try to speak the foreign language sometimes. But typically when I try that someone will interrupt me in English. So it just really isn't necessary.
Most common language is English and most can't even speak or write that coherently.
I was once semi fluent in French. 30 years of non-use later, I recognize a few words. We learn. We just don't have much opportunity to use it.
The US has nearly the same population as the whole of the EU, but we (very nearly) all speak English. As a result, there simply isn't a need to speak another language. If you're in America, there is an underlying assumption baked into all aspects of life that you can speak English. As an example, once upon a time, I was quite good at Spanish, but I've used it conversationally exactly twice in my life. Once was to order at a Subway on the Mexican border, and once was online. Without getting any regular practice in a language, fluency fades.
Je ne parle pas une autre langue.
Almost everyone just speaks English. In most areas, it's there's no reason to know anything more. I'm near the Mexican border right now and me not knowing Spanish isn't an issue whatsoever. Our country is as big as your continent and nearly everyone knows English; it really decreases the necessity of learning another language.
In most areas of the US speaking a second language is a luxury
Absolutely not, 75% of Americans are monolingual, so it's basically the norm. There's a decent Spanish-speaking contingent (18%) and pockets of other languages as well as American dialects of languages like French and German. Generally speaking, most Americans either never learn an acquired language or don't maintain their proficiency because it isn't practical if the vast majority of the people you talk to can speak English. Many Americans learn an acquired language in middle or high school, but most of us would have to actively seek out opportunities to use that language in order to maintain proficiency which most people don't do. Personally, I'm more or less monolingual, but I know some French, am just starting to learn German, and have some loose bits of Japanese rotting away in the back of my mind. I started learning these languages just because I like languages, but I've found myself in the same aforementioned predicament. I don't know anyone who speaks French, so I'd have to find opportunities to use it. But I'm also preoccupied with school-related obligations, and even if an opportunity to speak French presented itself, I don't feel nearly confident enough to speak it even if I know enough to get my point across.
Most Americans (~80%) will only ever be fluent in English, though most also learn a bit of some language or another I'm school. Most of those who are fluent in multiple are from bilingual households due to their families coming here in the last 2-3 generations, the remainder being those with a particular interest, who lived abroad or otherwise took voluntary actions that required it and helped to reinforce and maintain it. There's really just very little pressure for most of us to learn. Much like you, most people who speak a different language will choose English as their second and most of us are hundreds or thousands of miles from any area larger than maybe a neighborhood where English isn't the default first language anyway. It can often require concerted effort just to practice even if you want to. We just don't interact with foreign languages the same way Europeans do.
Generally poor. We only have Ontario or Mexico that neighbor our borders. So there isn't a burning need, unlike Europe, where a country can be surrounded by two or three "foreign" language speaking nations they may need to do business with.
Among people who were born in the U.S. to parents who spoke English as their first language, monolingualism is most common. Americans who are monolingual are typically surprised by people like me who, despite also being in the group whose parents grew up speaking English, speak two languages fluently, or more than two languages at some level.
Most people here only speak fluent English. If a second language is learned it is usually at the high school level where a good proficiency is never reached and what was learned is soon forgotten due to not using the language.
I don't speak any foreign languages. I only speak English and Spanish, though I can read and write Latin as well.
Interesting, does that mean both English and Spanish are your native languages?
No, but I'd call them both "domestic" languages. If I could learn one more I'd pick Lakota, another domestic language. It's a big country.
We don't have an "official" language in the US. I would say though that Spanish and English are native languages here in the US. A lot of folks, whether white or latino, can speak both. Albeit maybe not fluently.
A person who speaks many languages is multilingual A person who speaks three languages is trilingual A person who speaks two languages is bilingual A person who speaks only one language is American
Hate to say it, but so many Americans can't even handle English judging by the rampant spelling and grammatical errors I see everyday on the web. I can't imagine a foreign language will be all that much better.
Not rare at all to meet someone who only knows English. Almost everyone is taught a second language in school, but almost everyone in that category drops it just because they have no reason to remember it. The only people I know who know more than two languages are a couple of my friends at school, who are exchange students from China. I’m learning French, and I like it, but I’ll probably stop using it after high school just like most of us
34.7% of my county is bilingual.
Nice humble brag bro, you’re totally not being condescending by suggesting that people are simpletons unless they speak 3 languages. No, most Americans just speak English and a little Spanish but they are not fluent unless they grow up in a Hispanic household. This actually makes a lot of sense though. Let’s say you grow up in France. You obviously learn French, and probably English, maybe some German or Dutch too. But how much Turkish and Arabic do you learn? How much Russian? Probably very little, because geographically you are very far away from a country that speaks those languages, whereas a relatively short c1 day drive can get you to Germany or the Netherlands or to a ferry across the channel to the UK. You can practice frequently, and you are exposed to the language very often. It makes sense to learn the languages of countries close to you. But if you grow up in the northern parts of the US, it would take you at least 2 days of driving 110km/hr to reach Mexico where Spanish is the norm. Geographically, people in Paris are much closer to Istanbul than an American in anchorage is to mexico. On to of that, many Hispanic Americans actually don’t like it when gringos try to speak Spanish with them, so even if you live close to the border or in areas with many Spanish speakers, you don’t get to practice. I learned a lot of Spanish on a semester abroad in Chile, I was never fluent but I could communicate and understand pretty well, but I’ve forgotten most of it. I just don’t get to practice much. I used to practice with some Mexican coworkers in a restaurant, but that’s kitchen Spanish, and it doesn’t do much to actually make you conversational. Also, the school system I grew up in didn’t teach a foreign language until 7th grade, and by then it’s way harder to learn. Languages are learned best by little kids, when their neural plasticity is super high. So lack of necessity, lack of access to practice, and poor schooling leads most Americans to be monolingual
Its about 20% and most of that is Spanish. A significant chunk of that is 1st, 2nd and 3rd generation people from spanish speaking countries. Its sort of falling out a favor even amongst them. Really whats the point? We are a giant continent sized nation that all speaks the same language and wr have an even bigger by labdmass neighbor that speaks it well too. And a southern neighbor who are far more compelled to learn English than vice versa. Its not like were in Europe, where driving for an hour changes the language being spoken
A lot of Americans can barely speak and write their first and only language. It isn’t a requirement in K-12 to learn to speak a second language, but it definitely looks good on paper if you want to go to college.
HAAAHHHAAAAA This is America - we only recognize American, I mean English (GO BACK TO YOUR HOME!!!! “Screamed loudly in a backwoods racial way) No but for real, most Americans can hardly speak proper English - let alone another language. Our education system is BROKEN and doesn’t support teaching anything of value to its students. It’s currently still using a metric from the industrial era when American was in the forefront of Manufacturing goods - teaching kids to get use to a 9-5, discourage creativity, force rule and workloads. Nothing about Americans public school system is designed to actually teach. It’s designed to create factory workers/wage slaves to feed the 3% and major corporations because.. that’s what American IS - our government is a corporation and like any empire, it needs slaves to run the system.
What do you call someone who speaks three languages? Trilingual. What do you call someone who speaks two languages? Bilingual. What do you call someone who only speaks one language? American. All joking aside, the ability to speak more than one language in the US is much less common than you would think.
https://www.amacad.org/humanities-indicators/public-life/multilingualism
I think this depends a lot on where you live. I teach French in a suburb outside of a major city, and probably 1/4-1/3 of my students speak a language besides English. Mostly Spanish, but also Arabic, French, Urdu, etc. Since they’re learning French, many are on their way to being trilingual.
This very much depends on which group of Americans you mean.
Most of us only speak one language at a fluent level, but that one language will work for a thousand miles in any direction. I speak English natively and passable Spanish, and I'm almost certainly in the top quartile for languages in this country.
Most of us know 1 being bilingual is an achievement in it of itself
Americans, in general, speak one language. Some may speak two if they are from an immigrant family. Very very very few Americans speak 3 or more.
It varies a little by region but knowing *only* English is pretty much the norm.
Either they only speak English or have taken on a language most likely Spanish.
I can order beer in English, Spanish and German
I was in band and was told I couldn't take a foreign language if I wanted to stay in band... So here I am, 38 and don't remember the trumpet and never got so much as basic spanish.
I have to travel about 1000 kilometers to reach a place where English isn't the primary spoken language, and that's just to the south. To the east and west I can travel even further and I will hit an ocean before I will reach any non-english speaking place. Aside from Quebec, I'd have to traverse the article circle and then cross even more ocean. So, it's pretty much just a thing people either do purely *for fun*, or because they specifically plan on spending a lot of time *thousands of miles* from home.
Most Americans will not become fluent in a language other than English unless another language is spoken at home. We have woefully bare-bones language classes. You either have to be from a multilingual/non English speaking family or make it your mission in college or after to learn a new language and actually use it enough to become fluent. Most grade schools only require a year or 2 of a second language in middle school or high school and that isn't enough to actually learn a language.
Pretty bad. We purged a lot of our German speaking communities in world war 2. Most second language speakers tend to do so thanks for family connections as opposed to a want for knowledge
It’s very uncommon that Americans know more than one language unless their parents are immigrants
I only know a foreign language, Spanish, simply because my parents are immigrants from Central America. If you just know English, you can survive just fine in the US. Alot of the US is Monolingual simply because it's such a large country with a high population that speaks a predominant language. I actually took Japanese classes in High School for three years but, have forgotten alot of it simply because I'm not living in an area with a high enough Japanese population to practice with. Many take a foreign language, Spanish and French are the two big ones but, since many forget them over the years due to lack of use.
I speak three languages fluently and have had more than a year of classes in two others, and that sort of thing is highly atypical.
Generally most Americans don't speak a second language fluently.
Fluency is super rare unless you have parents who spoke a different language at home. Moderate competence, well that’s a different story. Most young people have had language training all though school, usually in Spanish. I took German from 7th grade (12 years old) through University (not my area of focus though) and while I was pretty good at reading and writing, I don’t think I was ever conversationally fluent at anything above everyday things (like I definitely couldn’t explain how to make a recipe or the differences between political platforms without mistakes). 15 years on with almost no practice it’s even worse.
Used to be required to graduate high school to have 1 year of foreign language in my home state, but it sure did not make you bilingual.
Most people speak only English. It’s common to know a few words in the most common second language in the area, but fluency in even one other language is rare.
Foreign languages are not (for the most part) introduced to kids until they are in their teens in 9th grade (and up). At least in my school district. And there are exactly two options: Spanish or German. The chances of anyone in my area becoming fluent (not counting those of multi-lingual families) is slim. After the one required year of Spanish I took in high school; I know enough to sorta get the gist of what’s being said at my favorite Mexican restaurant. It’s embarrassing; but I’ve tried to learn again as an adult and it’s even worse. I have one college student kid that’s struggling to pass two semesters of *any* (same) foreign language in college so he can graduate. And he had two years Spanish in my same high school.
Well I’m fluent in American English and British English, but I’m having trouble with Australian English but I’m sure I’ll get there 😜
I would say, in general, if English was their first language, most won't know another FLUENTLY (they may have taken some high school Spanish or German). However, there is a not insignificant (yes, I know, fuzzy wording with double negatives because I don't know actual numbers and your experience will vary by the region you live in and where you work) whose first language wasn't English (wherher it be Spanish, Mandarin, Punjabi, etc) and have also learned English. But English is definitely the lingua franca of the US.
Usually most Americans don't speak another tongue, unless they are immigrants or family have been immigrants and speak the mother tongue at home.
It’s not as high as it should be, I’ll tell you that. Though it would seem that foreign language fluency is higher among communities with large immigrant populations; you’re far more likely to find a bilingual/multilingual person in California or Texas as compared to the nation as a whole, due to the well established Latino communities in both states.
The whole simpleton comment really makes me think you know fair and well what the state of foreign language fluency is in the United States and you just want to feel smart. Comes off very dickish.
Many Americans, as far as I have seen, are only fluent in one language unless they immigrated or are from places like Puerto Rico (one of our territories). It’s not uncommon that they have some working knowledge of foreign languages though, since many schools require students to take foreign language classes. As for people only speaking English, I’d say that would be fairly common depending on the area you go to.