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Are you really trying to claim that there are many more new languages than 150 years ago? Or are you saying that there are many more literate people trying to l
by jleader 12y ago
Are you really trying to claim that there are many more new languages than 150 years ago? Or are you saying that there are many more literate people trying to learn a new language than 150 years ago?
The first claim is clearly absurd; only a handful of new languages have arisen or been invented in the last 150 years.
The second claim is best described by the wikipedian "citation needed". Whether it's true probably depends on what part of the world you're restricting yourself to. The US? The West? The world?
- apetresc 12y agoYeah, I'm restricting myself to North America, which is presumably what the article's also about (since he talks about the history of the American dictionary). No, I don't have any citations or anything, but I take it as self-evident that there's more people in North America for whom English is a second or third language than there were 150 years ago.
- jleader 12y agohttp://www.census.gov/how/infographics/foreign_born.html http://www.census.gov/how/infographics/foreign_born.html shows that the foreign-born population of the US oscillated around 13-14% through the 2nd half of the 19th century, dipped below 5% in 1970, and had not quite made it back up to 13% by the 2010 census. I actually hadn't realized how close we were to matching the earlier peak, until I looked it up.
- apetresc 12y agoForeign-born is one thing, but I have an intuitive sense that immigrants to the US came from European countries during the world-war era, and now they're mainly coming from India, China, and South America, whose native languages are much more different from English than Spanish, British English, French, Italian, or German.