The Top World Languages Spoken in the USA and Globally
For many of us, finding out what the top world languages spoken in the USA and globally are is so interesting! First, let’s take a look at the ones that take front and center stage in the States.
The MLA Language website indicates that English is spoken by 80 percent of Americans. Languages other than English are spoken by 19 percent of the rest. Here are the 10 most commonly reported home languages of English Language Learners in our public schools: (Fall 2017)
- Spanish 75%
- Arabic 2.7%
- Chinese 2.1%
- Vietnamese 1.6%
- Somali 0.8%
- Russian 0.7%
- Portuguese 0.7%
- Haitian, Haitian Creole 0.7%
- Hmong 0.06%
According to the Senior Graphics Editor for National Geographic, there are approximately 7,100 known languages in the world today. Surprisingly, only twenty-three of these languages are spoken by over 50 million people.
An article on the Linguistic Society website states that once you go beyond the big languages, such as Spanish, Mandarin Chinese and English, you can see on the chart that many others belong to an array of genetically distinct families. Whatever the degree of that diversity, however, one thing that’s certain is that a significant proportion of the languages in the world are, in fact, disappearing at an alarming rate, it added. For instance, about one-fourth of the global languages have less than a thousand speakers, and many experts agree that within the next century about 3,000 of the 7,100 languages will be extinct, Linguistic Society said. However, the majority of specialists agree that losing a language is better than a human species, itself, getting wiped out.
Educational programs that support ELL students’ first language, such as The Latino Family Literacy Project, can make an enormous difference on their overall academic and language acquisition success, especially if parents read in Spanish and kids read in English!