How many languages are spoken in your city or area?

Chinese, tagalog, japanese, turkish, german, spanish, portuguese, vietnamese, french, indonesian. I walked through the walmart, and I lost count of how many languages I heard. You would think a bus with United Nations diplomats stopped in to shop. Even living in New York I never heard so many different languages or dialects. Well correction. I did once and that was at the United Nations.

Lots.

@Pandora : I forgot to put Japanese in my list. How could I forget that? I speak it!

@Lightlyseared : Naturally.~

Mostly English, Italian, Hebrew, Ukrainian/Polish/Russian.

@Hawaii_Jake the hospital I work for has access to over 170 different interpreters and we still manage to find people we can’t comunicate with. (well we can but it mainly involves me pulling funny faces and lots of gesticulations)

For example we had a patient last week who only spoke Mandaic which, as far as I can work out, is only spoken by a handful of people in Iraq and one person in south bloody London

@Lightlyseared : Gesticulations? I’d like to see that for some lower G.I. maladies. :)

@Hawaii_Jake the upper GI ones are much better!

Wow, darned near all of them.

In my immediate working area alone we have English, Spanish, French, German, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, and a couple of Northern African dialects I don’t even know the name of.

FWIW, I work at a global high tech company and am surrounded by fellow engineers, many of whom are here on H1B visas as well as numerous tech writers who are just plain language geeks.

Here in the Memphis area I almost never hear foreign languages, but there are bilingual people here. Spanish, Filipino, Arabic, Chinese, and a little Russian.

Growing up in DC probably 50 languages are spoken in that city. Mostly I heard Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean, Farsi, Arabic, Spanish, German, Indian (I don’t even know if there is one language in India or several) Portuguese, Greek, and then a whole bunch of others I might not be able to identify.

English, and annoying Long Island accent.

In my hometown there are approximately 100.000 inhabitants.
A neighborhood close to where I live houses forty different nationalities (Somalia, Turkey, Morocco, Iraq, etc.), so I guess there must be at least forty one.

English, French, Spanish, Spaglish, Italian. Russian, German, Chinese, Japanese, Tagalog, Somali, Hindi, Hausa, Arabic, and Ibo, that I have heard. I’m sure there are more.

The city I live in has a major university that attracts students from all over the world, is the major headquarters for a well known research institute, and we have a large teaching hospital and cancer center, as well.

We also turn a sort of blind eye to immigrants, be they illegal or not.

The best part about having so many nationalities is that they open grocery stores and restaurants featuring the food of their native countries!

@Eureka : Hooray for ethnic food!

Two.
English and Bullshit. ;)

I live in south Florida, and most of the people I meet speak Spanish, but there are also quite a few who speak Creole.
We get a lot of Canadian tourists in Hollywood, so there’s a bit of French thrown in too.

English, Gaeilge(Irish) in the Gaeltacht areas, Polish and many many more.

@Hawaii_Jake – especially since I grew up on beef and potatoes, chicken and potatoes….

All of them :-)

The ones I commonly see and hear are English, Spanish, Korean, Ukrainian and Polish.

Being California, there are a lot of Spanish-speaking people here. Second would probably be Chinese. I don’t know of too much else other than a few exceptions of a family who speaks French, one I know who speaks Russian, etc. But Spanish and English are the #1 and #2 here. Also, not far from here there are a fair amount of people who speak Tongan or other Polynesian languages.

Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, English, and Arabic.

We have English (of course), Russian, Spanish, and at least three different African languages… just in the apartment complex I live in! Where I work, there are also Cambodian, Vietnamese, Korean, Chinese, and Filipino (though I don’t know which dialect(s) they speak; the Phillipines have a lot of languages amongst their islands). Since Seattle has more than the ~350 people that just my workplace and home have, I think you can get an idea of how diverse we are here.

Almost all of them in Washington DC.

@lucillelucillelucille Lawl. XD

In this small hicktown, it’s mostly French. There is a bit of English, but not too much. Everyone here is xenophobic and racist, and they hate me, too, because although I speak French, I’m from France, and not here. Fuck those ass sacks.
I like Montréal better, where there’s so many different people from all over that I have no idea how many specific languages are spoken, but sure as hell, there are many that are as prominent as French and English.

When I lived in Winnipeg, there was English, French, Inuit and Chinese. A few more, too.

You’ve godda be kiddin’.. Last week I even heard a group speaking pig latin.. (that makes about a hundred and plenty different languages in my city).

Just this past week I heard English, Spanish, French and Arabic at our local Walmart. We live in a county with less than 33,000 people, but the largest town has a major university.

55 languages are regularly taught at my university, with another 30 available depending on the demand. I hear Chinese, French, Spanish, Portugese, Japanese, German, Korean and Russian on a regular basis.

I live in Boston’s North End (Little Italy) so I hear as much Italian as English from the locals here. On top of this, this is a tourism Mecca. I’m just about next door to Paul Revere’s house and the Old North Church, where the “1 if by land and 2 if by sea” lantern signal was flashed from the bell tower. It’s 2 blocks down to a park that overlooks the Charlestown Naval Yard where the USS Constitution is docked. Virtually all the tourists pay the North End a visit. In addition, the city has a thriving Chinatown as well as a smaller but equally vibrant J’ Town., a Vietnamese area, tons of people from Hatti the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Guatemala and all of South America. We also have communities of refugees from all the waring African nations. We have a large Arab community. Many run shops that sell spices, dates, nuts, olives, olive oil and the like. If you get to know the shop owner, you can get some great bargains, because they will let you know when a discounted shipment is coming in.

I took a walk through much of the city a few days back, and I remarked to my wife that I heard less English being spoken than various foreign languages. There was French, Italian, German, Dutch, Polich, Yiddish, Farsi, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Thai, Spanish, Haitian Creole, and numerous African languages I could not identify. It must be a tough city for cab drivers, most of whom speak only the barest bit of English themselves. :-)

@Hawaii_Jake I’m from hawaii like you. same same

Lots. Aside from English, I think the commonest others would be Urdu, Hindi, Arabic, Chinese, Polish, Russian, Turkish.

I live in rural Pennsylvania and the primary language in English with a great many people speaking or at least understanding German (because of our town’s founders), they also speak Italian, and probably a little Mandarin.