On Sun, 30 Mar 2014 01:48:27 -0500, Mark H Harris wrote: > On 3/30/14 1:31 AM, Steven D'Aprano wrote: >>> I'm not sure what point you are trying to make. We have people here >>> from all over the earth, and enough illegal immigrants speaking >>> Spanish to account for a population about the size of Ohio. >> >> *raises eyebrow* >> >> Did you intend to imply that it is only illegal immigrants who speak >> Spanish in the USA? > > Don't be silly, Steven, it doesn't become you.
Given the sorts of patronising, condescending things you insist are true about non-Americans, such as their supposed inability to communicate in their own language on the Internet, I wasn't sure. >> The most recent US census found there are 38.5 million people in the US >> who primarily speak Spanish, and 45 million who speak it as their first >> or second language. In comparison, there are only an estimated 11 >> million illegal immigrants (of which only 7 million is from Mexico). >> >> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_language_in_the_United_States > > Hilarious! That's part of the problem, um, its because they are > *illegal* that the census bureau does not know about them in terms of > exact numbers; its a nice effort though. The number of illegal immigrants is not estimated from the Census numbers directly. It's not like they have a tick box "Are you in this country illegally?". Just because *you* don't know how illegal immigrant numbers are estimated, or what margin of error those estimates might have, don't make the mistake of imagining that any such effort is "hilarious", a joke, or otherwise useless. Naturally the figure is *estimated*, I even said it was estimated, and gave it as a round number. If I had said there were 11,205,971 illegal immigrants in the USA as of last Tuesday, then you would have a good excuse to mock my spurious precision. Otherwise, not so much. > America is a melting pot (always has been). We have thousands of > ethnic groups living here and thousands of languages spoken here. Not really. There are under 350 languages spoken in the USA. Over 92% of the population speaking just two of them, English and Spanish, with Chinese a *very* distant third. Only eight languages are spoken by more than 1 million people. Even if you double that figure, to capture "that one guy who speaks Gunwinyguan" and other outliers, you still end up well under even a single thousand. The surprising thing to me about this is not that the number of languages is so low (there are about 6000-7000 languages in the world), but that it is so high. I would have predicted well under 100. After all, spoken language popularity is an excellent example of network effects: the more people who speak a language, the more valuable it is to speak the same language. Network effects explain why, out of the six or seven thousand languages in the world, just thirteen account for more than half the world's population: 1) Mandarin 2) Spanish 3) English 4) Hindi 5) Arabic 6) Portuguese 7) Bengali 8) Russian 9) Japanese 10) Punjabi 11) German 12) Javanese 13) Wu adding up to 51%. The next thirteen bring the total to 64%. (Figures are, naturally, approximate and subject to change.) > All of > them are in some place on the continuum of English as a second language; > its the only way to survive here. Approximately 5% of the US population either do not speak English at all, or speak it poorly. That includes approximately half a million ASL speakers (American Sign Language, which is not a manual representation of English but an independent language in it's own right), the majority of whom are unable to speak or understand spoken English. Be careful of making sweeping generalisations like "the only way to survive". Especially when they're so judgemental. It's not like there are gangs of armed militia hunting down deaf children and foreign grannies who only speak the language of their homeland. Well, maybe in Arizona. *wink* -- Steven D'Aprano http://import-that.dreamwidth.org/ -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
