Daniel Lemire's blog

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French is the third language in the USA

3 thoughts on “French is the third language in the USA”

  1. According to the 2000 census, there are 1,643,838 French speakers >= 5 years old, but 2,022,143 Chinese speakers. French is fourth, I think. If you include French Creole, then there are an addtional 453,368 speakers.

    See: http://www.census.gov/population/cen2000/phc-t20/tab06.xls

  2. didier says:

    The table above doesn’t have anything specific about languages spoken (except Spanish). That may just be because I’m suing OO.org though. In any case, do they make a difference between Mandarin and Cantonese? Or are the all lumped together. If they are, “Chinese” (as a language) should probably be the 3rd most-spoken language.

  3. Ok, well, we can conclude that French is a frequently spoken language in the USA. How is that?