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How Many Languages are Spoken in the U.S. Exactly?
Every year I find someone to talk with in Wolof, the language I learned when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in The Gambia. Mostly, what I manage to conjure up are the greetings and part of a health talk I used to give. "Today I want to talk with you about the road to good health." I also know how to say, "Oh, that's too expensive. Reduce it a little." I can probably still get my laundry done.
Whenever I run into a Wolof speaker, there is a sense of delight and surprise that we've found each other. The first time I met up with a Wolof speaker in the U.S. was about a year after the Peace Corps when I was eating dinner at Boone Tavern in Berea, Kentucky.
My waiter was from The Gambia, something I found out after I noticed his accent and asked him where he was from. When I started rattling off Wolof greetings, he was momentarily thrown off guard, particularly since I had lived near his hometown.
Since Berea is a small town at the edge of Appalachia, I'm sure the last person he thought he would meet when he went to work that day was an American woman who knew Wolof. I was just as excited to find him. Since then, most of the Wolof speakers I've run into in the U.S. have been from Senegal.
I don't know how many Wolof speakers there are in the United States, but I've found a Web site, Languages of the World with some interesting U.S language statistics.
Here they are:
- Number of languages spoken in the U.S.: 311.
- Those languages indigenous to the U.S: 162
- Those that are immigrant languages: 149
- There are 14 million households in the United States where English is not the primary language.
Filed under: Arts and Culture, Gambia, United States, Hotels and Accommodations
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Mary Jervis Jul 22nd 2011 1:38PM
Your breakdown of the number of languages spoken in the United States is amazing. If I looked at the Spanish sites, they would have you believe that only English and Spanish are spoken here. I also found out that worldwide about 948 million people speak English.
Dimitrios Marantidis Jul 19th 2012 2:01PM
Here I am again and again with my answers in most of the Americans that I am speaking. None of them knows how many languages we are using here in our own home country other than English and Spanish and no more. I am here more than 40 years and I do speak with many many Americans that showing they do not speak even their own language. From a child I did learn the Latin language and there after I did learn to speak English,German,French,Spanish,Portuguese,Ukraine (Russian similar) and the Brazilian dialect because they are speaking different than the Portuguese. We have a problem here in our own country. Many young ones do not know where is New York etc. It is a shame of our own educational system the way works. We did went to the moon but we do not know simple things .