It's a language widely spoken in Luzon, the largest island of the Philippines. It was declared one of the official languages of the country by the Spanish, and still is along with English. It is also widely spoken and understood in other parts of the country.
If I remember right about the new description of filipino, it can mean any languange in the philippines. Tagalog is the only "filipino language" that most americans can speak. Im bad at explaining but yeah ahahahhahahhah
That might be how the US Census defines it? But in the Philippines, anyway, Filipino is a specific language and it is essentially identical to Tagalog. But they call it Filipino because it's the official language of the whole country and they didn't want to broadcast their favoritism to Luzon.
I think Iranians can use either Parsi or Farsi when describing the language. Someone I know from Iran used Parsi to describe the language, but I can't remember why she said she used Parsi instead of Farsi.
Dari is spoken by Persians from Afghanistan/Pakistan, I think. Basically the same as Persian. I met some refugees from that area at a park in Athens. We used Persian in Google Translate and understood each other fine.
True. However, the same is true for Mandarin, Cantonese and all the different languages all thrown together as 'Chinese' here. So by that same logic, French and Haitian Creole should be thrown together and be the fourth-most spoken language in the US in this list.
Depends on the French speaker. A lot can be understood once you get the hang of the pronunciation differences. And the grammar is easy to relate to. But yes, the languages are different and there's a lot of vocabulary unfamiliar to a French speaker, not to mention that the French Haitian Creole developed from is 18th century French so developed differently from France-French. I haven't been to Haiti yet but I had a pretty good time in Louisiana trying to get the hang of Creole there -- fascinating and challenging.
According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nahuatl#Demography_and_distribution), there are about 1.5 million Nahuatl speakers in Mexico, and most are in south & central regions. There probably are some speakers in the US but not hundreds of thousands as would be required to show up on this quiz.
I used to teach English to newcomer children in the LA area, and received several students from Mexico who spoke Nahuatl but not a word of Spanish. But it is definitely not common, not compared to the other languages on this list.
The Dutch of the Amish is Low German rather than Dutch. There has been a large number of Dutch immigrants to the US, but their descendants aren't Dutch speaking any more.
I'm a child of Dutch immigrants and I still speak it. It's actually quite well known in the areas where the Dutch settled. Northern NJ, Michigan, Iowa...
Dutch speakers were very prominent in Early American history, especially in New York and the Mid-Atlantic areas (you can still see the influence on place names). The Dutch language persisted in New York for over a century after the English took over the Dutch colonies there -- our only President who didn't speak English as his mother tongue, Martin van Buren, was from a Dutch speaking New York family. I'm pretty sure Dutch-American community he came from switched entirely to English sometime in the last two centuries though, and while we continue to have significant Dutch immigration the numbers dropped off a lot in the 20th century. Dutch speakers in the US like Qikiq probably number in the tens of thousands.
The historical New Netherlands was not monolinguistic, many of the first settlers were from the Low Countries, but French speakers (from southern Belgium/North of France), often refugees from the religious wars. They had less objections to migration, the Dutch struggled to find enough people willing to migrate to the New World. The colony existed for roughly 50 years and by that time over half of it's population spoke English. People still kept speaking Dutch for a while but it faded out over time, with less contact with the old mother country, education and transportation making it more difficult to only rely on Dutch if you wanted to make a career like Maarten Van Buren did...
Pennsylvania Dutch is a form of High German from the Upper Rhine, so I expect it's lumped in with German, here. It should not be; it's really a separate language. The English word "Dutch" used to refer to any Germanic people or language, so although it's confusing, it's not a misnomer. 400,000 people speak it, and it's growing. (Mir schwetze noch die Mudderschprooch!)
Ok according to the source used for this quiz ( mind you data till 2013) pennsylvanian dutch had 133k speakers. (which is like said above more like german (deutsch) and has nothing to do with dutch. Which is spoken slightly more but still not enought on make this list 142k)
there is no such thing as "proper english", though
AAVE is a fully fledged dialect of English with its own established syntax and grammatical rules—just because it doesn't match what is taught in school doesn't mean that it is of less value (see how standard American English is perceived in other English-speaking communities)
African American English has its origins in the English language spoken by poor whites in the south especially indentured servants who worked along African slaves in the first century of settlement. The dialect evolved in the Great Migration into northern cities in the early 20th century.
Updating the quiz is not going to affect whether Yiddish appears on the quiz or not - numbers of speakers are decreasing over time - speakers of the language are mostly elderly now and few are passing it on to the younger generations in the US. The language is also endangered globally.
For some reason the Census now groups Pennsylvania Dutch together with Yiddish. I imagine that both languages are growing rapidly due to astronomical birth rates in Amish and Hasidic communities.
I was surprised Tamil didn't make it, but perhaps the US has gotten less of the Tamil diaspora than we have here in Australia. I s'pose proximity counts for something.
Cajun French is a dialect of French that comes from Acadian French. Creoles are an entirely different set of languages. It's likely that the majority of French Creole speakers here are Haitian, but Louisiana Creole is a different language again that is often referred to as just 'Creole', and which is different from Cajun.
Yiddish and Penn Dutch (Deutsch) are both variants (i won't call them dialects for fear of angering someone) of German. I've heard that some folks that know one are able to understand the other, some don't.
Ridiculous. Hindi and Urdu are counted separately, French and Haitian creole are counted separately, but Igbo and Yoruba are counted together? Igbo and Yoruba are definitely separate languages, not dialects of each other.
Could you do one for Australia, if you have the data? The same languages are likely to be on there, but in a completely different order - the difference would be quite extraordinary.
Weird that the subcontinental Indian languages are listed separately (mostly) whereas all the Chinese languages are lumped into one! I can only guess this comes from the fact Chinese languages look the same when written down (well, bearing in mind the modern simplification).
Must be because India doesn't claim that everything is one language, also North Indian and South Indian languages, both of which have multiple major languages, are completely unrelated linguistically, so it wouldn't make sense; even China doesn't claim that minority languages unrelated to Chinese (Sinitic) languages are dialects.
Grand total there may be around 400k Native Americans in the USA, so even if all native languages were grouped in a single group (I doubt it's the case) and all spoke their ancestral language at home, they would still not make the list.
I wish they would have added aave and asl. aave is extremely common and different than english. asl is also often excluded from languages because it isnt a spoken language, but is still extremely valid and used through the country /:
Lumping Chinese as one language then splitting French from French Creole is just silly. And lazy. And before you ask, yes, I saw the disclaimer. All it means is that you've found the stats somewhere and made them into a rubbish quiz!
Why would Somali and Amharic be classified as interchangeable? They don't even belong to the same language family! Yet Hindi and Urdu (which is just Persianite Hindi) are different
Interesting, french would shoot up to 4th place if counted together with french creole.
But there are some wide varieties of creole. Louisiana creole sounds almost exactly like french but writes nothing alike, it looks transcribed with english rules. Haitian creole is further away from french.
Good quiz but didn't do that well!
According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nahuatl#Demography_and_distribution), there are about 1.5 million Nahuatl speakers in Mexico, and most are in south & central regions. There probably are some speakers in the US but not hundreds of thousands as would be required to show up on this quiz.
http://www.pbs.org/speak/ahead/change/ruining/
AAVE is a fully fledged dialect of English with its own established syntax and grammatical rules—just because it doesn't match what is taught in school doesn't mean that it is of less value (see how standard American English is perceived in other English-speaking communities)
... maybe update in 3-5 more years.
But there are some wide varieties of creole. Louisiana creole sounds almost exactly like french but writes nothing alike, it looks transcribed with english rules. Haitian creole is further away from french.