this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
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The whole South America:
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.
What about all the African countries south of the equator? Afrikaans is the obvious one, but there must be hundreds of tribal languages. Also don't forget Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. The Amazon surely has tribal languages too.
East vs west, not north vs south.
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.
Sorry, but you have a lot of places where different languages melt and mix, especially near Brazil. They don't speak Spanish there