French is the third language in the USA
I don’t know how reliable this is, but through Didier, I learned that French is the third language spoken in the US. Here are the numbers:
| Rank | Language | Speakers |
| 1 | English | 215,423,555 |
| 2 | Spanish | 28,100,725 |
| 3 | French | 1,606,790 |
| 4 | Chinese | 1,499,635 |
It seems amazing that Chinese would not greatly outnumber French. Go figure!
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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
Comment by Will Fitzgerald — 16/3/2005 @ 13:46
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.
Comment by didier — 17/3/2005 @ 2:25
Ok, well, we can conclude that French is a frequently spoken language in the USA. How is that?
Comment by Daniel Lemire — 17/3/2005 @ 10:16