Top Three Languages

[Superlative]

I have a hypothesis that the most common and second most common languages in an area tend to be static nation wide but the third varies based on the area. Where I'm from (a major city in the American Mid-West) the first and second languages are the same as the rest of the country (English and Spanish) but the third, Somali, isn't common elsewhere. is it like that where your from?

 

[Addendum_Forthcoming]

Australia has 5 common languages; English, Vietnamese, Cantonese, Mandarin and Italian.... four of them don't really extend beyond the greater metro suburbia of Sydney and Melbourne.

(Edit) To be fair, Greater Sydney and Melbourne areas make up half the human population in the entire country.

 

[Parasondox]

Should we agree that "English" is basically a mixture of other languages put together, or no?

 

[Albino Boo]

Should we agree that "English" is basically a mixture of other languages put together, or no?

Yeah but virtually all languages are to one extent or another. Modern French is made up from 3 older groups of languages Langues d'o?l Langues d'oc and Franco-Provencal. If you want to go back even further all but 5 native European languages still in use had a common ancestry somewhere between 9000 to 6000 years ago.

 

[Secondhand Revenant]

I have a hypothesis that the most common and second most common languages in an area tend to be static nation wide but the third varies based on the area. Where I'm from (a major city in the American Mid-West) the first and second languages are the same as the rest of the country (English and Spanish) but the third, Somali, isn't common elsewhere. is it like that where your from?

I'm from CA and it's likely English and Spanish, and I have no idea on the third...


But about your theory... First idea was to check Louisiana and Wikipedia says 14.7% speak French or Cajun French while 1.5% speak Spanish. Or at least that was the case in 2000

 

[CeeBod]

Sorry to further disprove your hypothesis, but in the UK it's only the most common language that's static. Welsh is just about still the 2nd most common language, but is never heard outside of Wales. Polish is 3rd most common but is mostly confined to London and areas in the East / South East. Where I'm originally from in the North West there was a lot of Gujurati and Urdu spoken - to the extent that I learned to swear fairly fluently in both whilst growing up! Where I live now there's a sizeable Cantonese-speaking minority.

 

[MysticSlayer]

In Florida, the top language depends on where you are. In most of the state, English is the top followed by Spanish. Plenty of places, though, have Spanish as the first language and English as the second. Third for the state would probably be Haitian Creole or French.

 

[Level 7 Dragon]

Currently living in Moscow, so it will be Russian/English/Ukrainian

In my hometown, Ulyanovsk it's russian/english and the third seems to be a split between german and tatar. Mainly because Ulyanovsk has a large russian german community that existed since the 17'th century and at the same time the region borders Tatarstan.

 

[LongAndShort]

Australia has 5 common languages; English, Vietnamese, Cantonese, Mandarin and Italian.... four of them don't really extend beyond the greater metro suburbia of Sydney and Melbourne.

(Edit) To be fair, Greater Sydney and Melbourne areas make up half the human population in the entire country.

Missed Greek in there mate, and I reckon it'd give Italian a run for it's money (especially since Melbourne's supposed to have the largest population of Greeks outside of Athens or something crazy like that).

 

[Addendum_Forthcoming]

Missed Greek in there mate, and I reckon it'd give Italian a run for it's money (especially since Melbourne's supposed to have the largest population of Greeks outside of Athens or something crazy like that).

Most probably ... I might be speaking strictly about Sydney in terms of those stats.

 

[Pseudonym]

In the Netherlands where I live Dutch and English are firmly first and second. Dutch being what people speak in the streets and generally everywhere and English being a large part of what is shown on TV (with dutch subs), in games (ussually without dutch subs) in university material, etc. After that, I'm guessing German in most places. Most people here can manage at least a small bit of German and/or French. Our direct neighbours are the flemish part of Belgium where people speak dutch and the Germany where people speak German. In the province of Friesland (Frisia) some people about half the population speaks Frisian (I don't know how well or how often they speak it) which is officially regocnised as an indigenous language.

 

[Aesir23]

Where I'm from in southern Manitoba English and French are the two main languages which likely comes as no surprise. I'm not sure that the third most common language would be but my city has a pretty large Filipino population so Tagalog would be my best guess.

Edit:\\ After a quick google search it turns out that Tagalog is actually slightly more common than French which I didn't expect.

 

[Zontar]

Living in Quebec the two most spoken languages here are French and English. After that it' Arabic which slightly edges out over Spanish and Italian.

 

[Vicarious Reality]

No, everyone speaks swedish and you only find refugee speak in city ghettos and a tiny fraction of sami above us

 

[Guffe]

Finland here.
We are a bilingual country so our most common language should be Finnish and Swedish which we have in our constitution as Languages used in Finland are Finnish and Swedish.
Almost every finns knows English to some degree (maybe not the 60+ generation) but most others.
Then if people leave in the eastern parts of Finland, most people know Russian to some degree and in the North we have the Same people who speak Same/Samish?
Quite few of my friends also studied German at some point in school, not sure how common that is across the country though.

 

[KyuubiNoKitsune-Hime]

In my little slice of Nevada (Reno/Sparks metro area) the first most common language is English, the Second is Central/South American Spanish, which is different from Europe's Spanish. The real surprise is that the third most common language, which could easily displace Spanish sometime in the near future, is Tagalog. Rounding out the rest of the top 10 most common languages follow in this order: Hindi, Vietnamese, Arabic, Mandarin, Portuguese, German, and Japanese.

 

[Artina89]

I do remember in the UK that there was a bit of a furore that Polish became the second language, which baffled me that people were outraged that a "second" language was not English...

I think the three most common languages in the UK, at least as of a couple of years ago according to the 2011 census were:

English (92.3% of the population)
Polish (1.0% of the population)
Punjabi (0.5% of the population)