You know there are 34 countries in America other than the United States.
You are welcome to remind people of this, but don’t expect that you’ll change anyone’s habits on an English-speaking USA-based forum.
America's Most-Spoken Languages After English and Spanish
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Re: America's Most-Spoken Languages After English and Spanish
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
the point is to give an idea of the approximate region that people come from, not to give a professionally accurate linguistic picture
Mandarin and Cantonese are distinct, mutually unintelligible languages that sound as different to each other as Spanish and French.
Cantonese is a language, yes, but mutual intelligibility and similarity to other languages is hardly relevant unless the languages are very similar indeed.
For example, there are spoken varieties of English that are mutually unintelligible, while speakers of different Slavic languages are often capable of having a good conversation by speaking slowly and listening carefully.
In practice the main criterion for being a language as opposed to a continuum of dialects is the degree of standardisation. So an example of something that may or may not be a language might be something like Swiss German (but I'm not an expert so I can't guarantee that's a good example). Another type of borderline case is when you have two standardised languages which differ only slightly, for example US English and GB English, or DE German and AT German.
Re: America's Most-Spoken Languages After English and Spanish
#13You know there are 34 countries in America other than the United States.
You are welcome to remind people of this, but don’t expect that you’ll change anyone’s habits on an English-speaking USA-based forum.
The USAians are largely seemingly already convinced the name of their country starts with an A, those that live elsewhere generally have better geography chops, so you're correct - it's unlikely any minds will change.
Re: America's Most-Spoken Languages After English and Spanish
#14What in the world is “other native” supposed to mean? Those languages don’t have names?
Re: America's Most-Spoken Languages After English and Spanish
#15> Chinese (Mandarin/Cantonese) This is enough to discredit the whole infographic in my eyes. No matter what the CPC or anybody else may claim, these are distinct languages, and not dialects. Not only that, but in some of these places a lot of Chinese speak other regional Chinese languages, such as Fuzhounese, rather than Mandarin or Cantonese. (I remember a blog from twenty or so years ago by a NYC Chinatown native w…
While I land on agreeing that finer language data should be collected anonymously, I think you may be too quick to view the motivations through a modern geopolitical lens. Historically Chinese American have had bigger domestic issues than this. Just a decade ago, Asian Americans in Massachusetts protested bill H3361 out of fear that finer census data would be used improperly.
Re: America's Most-Spoken Languages After English and Spanish
#16It would be helpful to show n. speakers of those languages or at least grade based on % of remaining non-English, non-Spanish speakers. My intuition is that German, for example, is much less active of a language in the US, where immigration peaked long ago, than Chinese, where immigration is active.
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Re: America's Most-Spoken Languages After English and Spanish
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
the point is to give an idea of the approximate region that people come from, not to give a professionally accurate linguistic picture
Mandarin and Cantonese are distinct, mutually unintelligible languages that sound as different to each other as Spanish and French.
it's about cultural relatedness from a Western centric pov, not language
Re: America's Most-Spoken Languages After English and Spanish
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are welcome to remind people of this, but don’t expect that you’ll change anyone’s habits on an English-speaking USA-based forum.
The USAians are largely seemingly already convinced the name of their country starts with an A, those that live elsewhere generally have better geography chops, so you're correct - it's unlikely any minds will change.
It's possible for a name to refer to both a country and a continent (or two). Just as "New York" could mean the state or the city.
Re: America's Most-Spoken Languages After English and Spanish
#19What in the world is “other native” supposed to mean? Those languages don’t have names?
creole?
Re: America's Most-Spoken Languages After English and Spanish
#20You know there are 34 countries in America other than the United States.
In English that would be "the Americas".
I am quite surprised no one is bothered by the fact that the name is that of a colonialist and slave trader (he personally took part is slave raiding).