You might be surprised. Half of us were either born overseas or had at least one parent born overseas. A little under a third of us have English as our second language. That doesn’t mean that two thirds of us only speak English - only that English is our ‘home’ language.
I know there’s a lot of multiculuralism in the USA also, but I don’t know whether those percentages compare.
Source: https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/lookup/media release3
Wasn’t the whole point of Farscape that Aussies didn’t speak English and that one Florida guy had to teach them how?
The whole South America:
Well it depends, in my city in Colombia they pushed english a lot. Was also mandatory in my university in case your school was not bilingual. May be an oddity but you are certainly expected to learn it at some point to not fall behind in this globalized world. Also USA companies hire people cheaply across all industries and have common time zones, so it can be actually worth.
Yeah, in mine too. But if you are not going to leave the continent or study it is not so necessary. I mean the reason I know English is just to look for knowledge.
Also as just @Badass_panda says, 3 languages in the whole hemisphere.
Right? People are forgetting that we’ve got essentially three languages in the entire hemisphere.
You speak three languages in Europe? Congrats you speak 12% of the commonly spoken / national languages.
Speak one language in the Americas? Congrats, you speak 1/3 of them!
I’m assuming the third language is French? And I mean really how gives a fuck about Quebec. They just push the language to be assholes.
So really there are two…
Portuguese, there’s a few hundred million speakers of Portuguese in South America.
I suppose I should have included French and made it four … there’s Quebec, but also Martinique, French Guiana, and so on. Maybe 10-15 million all in all?
Vs. ~450m for Spanish, ~400m for English and ~300m for Portuguese.
we insert token Maori words at the beginning and end of our emails, that totally counts
Australians? You mean upside down Americans?
