Most Commonly-Taught Languages in the U.S.

why?

Are you one of those people who thinks that sign languages are just regular languages adapted to finger spelling?

I think it is great to be included just to remind people in general that you don't have to be able to hear and speak to have a language. I also didn't think of sign language at all.

Aw. Japanese was my daughter's favourite subject at high school.

In my local high school in New Zealand it's Maori, Chinese, Japanese, and German. Other schools here might offer French or Spanish, or occasionally Latin, Korean or Samoan.

We had Spanish, French, and Latin

My school has French, German, Italian, Chinese, Latin, Ancient Greek and Sanskrit.

We had Spanish, French and ASL

Latin, French, Spanish and/or German were assigned for the first two years and optional after that. Of all the things I’ve learned and forgotten I think I regret Latin most

My school doesn't have any...

We have Spanish, French and mandatory Irish.

To be exact Bahasa Indonesian, but they got the language and change it slightly from Bahasa Malay

Hmm... let me guess which one you're referring to...

Turkish might be more valuable than Swedish. And possibly Ukrainian. This is assuming that you already speak English.

Depends a lot on what career field you want to go into and where you live or wish to live. If you want to be a teacher, social worker, politician, or manage a construction company in Texas, Spanish would be extremely valuable. If you want to be an engineer you're better off studying Japanese, Chinese, or German.

I have not ever heard someone speak any form of Chinese here.

I've had three conversations in Spanish today just by walking my dog around the block. Not a day goes by that someone doesn't say something to me in Spanish, so I'd say it's still the most useful in the U.S.

The world lingua franca is generally English and Americans almost have a mindset like the US is the only country that exists. There is really no cultural pressure for people to learn other languages and for schools to actually try to make people fluent in them. You won't learn a language with the conventional American school system.

Most Americans I know are at least conversational in a second language, but I also went to very good schools and have a white-collar career, so my experience is probably not the norm. I echo alejour's sentiment in part: learning a second language is not as pressing for Americans as it is for people in other parts of the world because English is the most common language across the world (I don't mean by sheer number of speakers. I mean that you can find it everywhere). If you're an American tourist in any major global city, you can find English speakers. If you're a Swede who only speaks Swedish, you are unlikely to find your language outside your country, which is a big problem. In my experience, Americans are much better at second languages than the English or Australians though.

There are millions of Americans who are very fluent in Spanish. There are also millions of Americans who took it for three years in high school because they had to, crammed the night before for every test, and promptly forgot everything they had learned the following year if not the following week, because if you only speak English you can get by perfectly fine and there's nothing ignorant or chauvunistic about that statement it's just factual if you live in the United States.

Why do Europeans always forget they live in an area smaller than the United States and are fractured by scores of languages whereas the larger U.S. functions on one?

Also consider the fact that the percentages are just how many schools offer the course, and not how many students actually take it. Plus, schools which require x years of a language to graduate often have multiple options. (Also like the garbage American school system but we can just brush that under the rug fs)

rich linguistic and cultural history? learning alongside latin to be able to study classics? just for the fun of it?

morse is just a code for english

It's the most spoken primarily because it's spoken in a very populated country. Outside of China, not nearly so much. Whereas many of the other languages on this list are spoken in a large number of countries and by probability will be more useful to any given student.