[WHPR] International Mother Language Day
James S. Brady Press Room
eUSA has been invited to partake in the eRepublik-wide event called International Mother Language Day. This event calls for each country that is participating to write an essay on its native or mother language(s). This is eUSA’s entry and I wanna thank the event organizers and viewers for reading.
First of all before we get into it I would like to remind everyone that the United States does not have an official language because constitutionally this is questionable, but our government business is almost always carried out in English. specifically American English but there can be different dialects of this depending on the region that you live in or visit or the people you talk to. However, certain states in the United States have an official language and some of these states include: Mississippi, Indiana, Hawaii and many more. Hawaii has two official languages Hawaiian and English and Alaska has several official languages all of which are native and none of which are English.
Without further ado, let's get into it.
Native Languages:
Before Europeans had arrived on the North American continent there were hundreds of different languages being spoken in and around the land we call the United States and hundreds of different tribes of Native Americans but it is difficult to know exactly how many languages there were back then and across time.
In 1929 Edward Sapir organized several native linguistic groups into six major linguistic families these families are:
Algonquian-Wakashan - With over 50 different languages ranging from the Algonquin on the east coast to the Wakashan speakers in the Pacific-Northwest this family is and was prevalent across the United States.
Hokan-Siouan - This Linguistic family has languages in it that are disputable but the speakers range from the southeastern United States up across the midwest into Canada and in some places in the southwestern United States and some of the languages included in this family are: Mohave, Oneida, Mohawk, and Seneca.
Aztec-Tanoan - The languages in this family are spoken from Mexico on up into the Central US and they include: Hopi, Shoshone, and Comanche. This linguistic family is thought to show some polysynthesism.
Nadene - This linguistic family consists of languages spoken in Alaska and in Canada and languages that fall into this group include: Athabascan, Haida, and Tlingit. These languages are somewhat polysynthetic.
Penutian - This family has speakers mostly in the southwest and on the pacific coast in california. Languages in this family include: Chinook, Maidu, and Wintun
Hokan-Siouan - the classifications of linguistic groups in this family are somewhat disputed but some of the languages included are: Creek, Pawnee, and Wichita. This family has speakers across the eastern and central United States.
Modern Native Languages by usage:
Navajo: -165k speakers
Yupik: -19k speakers
Dakota: -18k speakers
Apache: -13k speakers
Keres: -13k speakers
Cherokee: -11k speakers
Ojibwa: -10k speakers
Choctaw: -10k speakers
Zuni: -10k speakers
Pima: - 7k speakers
European Languages:
English: – 229.7 million speakers
Spanish: – 40.5 million speakers
French: – 1.2 million speakers
Russian: – 0.91 million speakers
German: – 0.91 million speakers
Haitian Creole: – 0.86 million
Portuguese: – 0.77 million speakers
Italian: – 0.58 million speakers
Polish: – 0.54 million speakers
Greek: – 0.29 million
Armenian: – 0.24 million speakers
Serb-Cro (including Bosnian, and Montenegrin): – 0.24 million speakers
Asian, African, and Middle Eastern Languages
Chinese: – 3.4 million speakers
Vietnamese: – 1.5 million speakers
Arabic: – 1.2 million speakers
Tagalog: - 1.6 million speakers
Korean: – 1.1 million speakers
Hindi: – 0.81 million speakers
Japanese: – 0.46 million speakers
Persian: – 0.44 million speakers
Hebrew: – 0.23 million speakers
Bantu and Swahili: – 0.22 million speakers
Thank you for reading, I hope this was enjoyable and informative and eUSA is happy to have participated. Thanks again to the event organizers and our viewers.
Comments
[WHPR] International Mother Language Day!
https://www.erepublik.com/en/article/-whpr-international-mother-language-day-2691370
Great Info @!
Most Dutch switched to English because that language is very near to Dutch.
Never forget cookies are originally Dutch. "Koekies" or "koekjes" are little "koek". 😉
o7
o7
Lots of Dutch place names and geographic references are still found in New York state
A great topic. Thanks for writing this.
A few additional notes...
There are about 1.6 M Tagalog speakers in USA. Not sure why this important language was not listed?
While "Persian" is widely used to refer to the language, it is probably more useful to say "Farsi" as it refers more specifically to the language while Persian is more general reference to Persian/Iranian culture in general.
Regarding indigenous languages those that are still spoken by a fairly sizable community in the USA, in descending order of usage, would be:
* Navajo (Diné people in Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado)
* Yupik (Siberian Alaskans)
* Sioux, also called Lakota (Lakota people in North Dakota, South Dakota and Minnesota)
* Apache (Apache people mainly in New Mexico)
* Rio Grande Keresan (Hopi, Zuni, Tanoan, Tewa and Tiwa, sometimes referred to collectively as "pueblo" people, mainly in New Mexico)
* Cherokee, also called Tsalagi (an Iroquois language spoken by some folks in the Cherokee diaspora)
Thank you I will update this in a moment. o>
Sorry, one more note:
Although many Haitians are trilingual in French, English and Creole, and French is widely spoken in Haiti, Haitian Creole (kreyol ayisyen) is not the same thing as French, nor is it a dialect of French. It is language with many French cognates, but also many unique features of its own, along with a grammatical structure similar to the West African language Fon. There are somewhere in the area of a half-million speakers of Haitian Creole in the USA, mostly in/around Miami, NYC, Boston and Orlando.
I get a little obsessed with this stuff because my RL great-aunt, Thelma Adamson Salant, also studied under Franz Boas at Colombia, along with Edward Sapir, Nora Zeale Hurston, Gilberto Freyre, Margaret Mead and many others. Her book on Coast Salish Folk-Tales and songs remains a key reference and, incidentally, one of my favorite books as a kid. Boas was remarkable person and intellectual. He basically invented modern anthropology, was a staunch defender of scientific theory of evolution against sociobiology and other nonsense. He was a profoundly influential opponent of racial prejudice and trained a whole generation of folks in the science of understanding one another.
Parabéns aos americanos pela participação!
gichi-mindido naa a'aw gookoosh
Miijidaa!
I speak American, damnit. Ain't no other language worth bothering about.
Ah bleev y'all mean Murkin, hoss. 🙂
Great article and interesting info!
Ps. If you want to read about Croatian language history, check this link:
https://www.erepublik.com/en/article/international-mother-language-day1-2691418/1/20
o7
R.
no doubt, USA is a superpower
everyone speaks English because of her world influence
Vote
o7
well, this was extraordinary..
Nice work.