# data[].attributes.body
This says almost all of the languages spoken in the U.S

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Society
English reigns in the United States, but Spanish and other languages are also spoken throughout the country.

Although the country has no official language, English is the most commonly spoken language within the United States, and the explanation for this is very simple. America, before gaining its independence, was a British colony. The country therefore inherited much of its culture as well as language from the British. A majority of the country's population has British ancestry which, along with other factors, has contributed to English standing strong within American language and culture. English is used in official platforms across most states, and almost the entirety of the population has basic knowledge regarding English language usage. Still, other languages are gaining traction as being frequently used within America's borders, and we look at some of the most prominent influences on this trend.

A Country of Immigrants

Immigration has largely influenced the demographic patterns of the United States. The predominant majority of US immigrants hail from neighboring Mexico and other Latin American countries. A large influx of Hispanic people has made Spanish the second most widely spoken language within the country, and the number is ever growing as Spanish-speaking influences are unlikely to lose ground anytime soon. In California and Texas, the Spanish language is spoken and understood to some degree by over 20% of the population. Other states where Spanish's influence can be greatly felt are New York and Florida. With the latter, this can be attributed to being close to Cuba and receiving many immigrants from there and from elsewhere in the Caribbean.

The Role of Media

Technology has had a direct influence on the frequency and variety of languages being spoken in the United States. This has increased with the high level of tech dominance that the country has come to enjoy in recent years. Tech companies, in a bid to keep up with a high level of global competition, have been forced to call in expatriates from other tech dominant nations. Most of these expatriates are from Asian countries where technology has been at the forefront of economic development for decades. Mandarin Chinese is the most widely spoken Asian language, with the figure being put close to 2% of the United States general population being able to communicate in it. Many Asians have also moved into the US for other business purposes as well. Besides Chinese, other Asian languages commonly heard spoken within the United States include Korean, Tagalog, and Vietnamese.

German and Jewish Influences

Though English and Spanish lead the pack of common languages spoken in the United States, two other interesting common languages are German and Hebrew. There have been large numbers of German immigrants coming into America for centuries since the colonization of the New World. In fact, German-Americans are among the largest groups of ethnic identities present within the country, and the German influence in the United States can be heavily felt in places such as Chicago and the Dakotas. Hebrew is also commonly spoken around the country, and this can be explained by the fact that the United States is also one of the countries with the highest Jewish populations outside Israel. The United States and Israel share very close political and economic ties, and this has contributed to a large influx of Israelis into the country. Many Jews also immigrated to the US from Europe, especially in relation to the rise of Fascism and the events of World War II, along with other tragedies on the European continent during the 20th century. Los Angeles and New York City are great examples of American cities with large Jewish populations today, with a preferred language of communication often being Hebrew.

The Absence of Native American Languages

Without question, the United States is highly multicultural as a country, due to having drawn so many people from all parts of the world to live and work within its shores. But once cannot forget about the many Native American languages spoken by the original inhabitants of this area. Many Native American tribes are emphasizing that their children learn their original languages, lest they should be lost after centuries of persecution and imposed assimilation. This being said, it is worth noting that no Native American language actually makes it to the list of the top 25 spoken within the United States. The Navajo language, which is the most widely spoken Native American language in the US today, has only roughly 170 thousand speakers, with Hebrew just making it to the 25th spot on the list with close to 213 thousand speakers. The state of the preservation and growth of Native American languages is still a major issue within the US.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Society English reigns in the United States, but Spanish and other languages are also spoken throughout the country. Although the country has no official language, English is the most commonly spoken language within the United States, and the explanation for this is very simple. America, before gaining its independence, was a British colony.

# data[].attributes.body
This explains why are there so much languages in the world and how it comes to be

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The thatched roof held back the sun's rays, but it could not keep the tropical heat at bay. As everyone at the research workshop headed outside for a break, small groups splintered off to gather in the shade of coconut trees and enjoy a breeze. I wandered from group to group, joining in the discussions. Each time, I noticed that the language of the conversation would change from an indigenous language to something they knew I could understand, Bislama or English. I was amazed by the ease with which the meeting's participants switched between languages, but I was even more astonished by the number of different indigenous languages.

Thirty people had gathered for the workshop on this island in the South Pacific, and all except for me came from the island, called Makelua, in the nation of Vanuatu. They lived in 16 different communities and spoke 16 distinct languages.

In many cases, you could stand at the edge of one village and see the outskirts of the next community. Yet the residents of each village spoke completely different languages. According to recent work by my colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, this island, just 100 kilometers long and 20 kilometers wide, is home to speakers of perhaps 40 different indigenous languages. Why so many?

We could ask this same question of the entire globe. People don't speak one universal language, or even a handful. Instead, today our species collectively speaks over 7,000 distinct languages.

And these languages are not spread randomly across the planet. For example, far more languages are found in tropical regions than in the temperate zones. The tropical island of New Guinea is home to over 900 languages. Russia, 20 times larger, has 105 indigenous languages. Even within the tropics, language diversity varies widely. For example, the 250,000 people who live on Vanuatu's 80 islands speak 110 different languages, but in Bangladesh, a population 600 times greater speaks only 41 languages.

Why is it that humans speak so many languages? And why are they so unevenly spread across the planet? As it turns out, we have few clear answers to these fundamental questions about how humanity communicates.

Some ideas, but little evidence

Most people can easily brainstorm possible answers to these intriguing questions. They hypothesize that language diversity must be about history, cultural differences, mountains or oceans dividing populations, or old squabbles writ large - "we hated them, so we don't talk to them."

The questions also seem like they should be fundamental to many academic disciplines - linguistics, anthropology, human geography. But, starting in 2010, when our diverse team of researchers from six different disciplines and eight different countries began to review what was known, we were shocked that only a dozen previous studies had been done, including one we ourselves completed on language diversity in the Pacific.

These prior efforts all examined the degree to which different environmental, social and geographic variables correlated with the number of languages found in a given location. The results varied a lot from one study to another, and no clear patterns emerged. The studies also ran up against many methodological challenges, the biggest of which centered on the old statistical adage - correlation does not equal causation.

We wanted to know the exact steps that led to so many languages forming in certain places and so few in others. But previous work provided few robust theories on the specific processes involved, and the methods used did not get us any closer to understanding the causes of language diversity patterns.

For example, previous studies pointed out that at lower latitudes languages are often spoken across smaller areas than at higher latitudes. You can fit more languages into a given area the closer you get to the equator. But this result does not tell us much about the processes that create language diversity. Just because a group of people crosses an imaginary latitudinal line on the map doesn't mean they'll automatically divide into two different populations speaking two different languages. Latitude might be correlated with language diversity, but it certainly did not create it.

Can a simple model predict reality?

A better way to identify the causes of particular patterns is to simulate the processes we think might be creating them. The closer the model's products are to the reality we know exists, the greater the chances are that we understand the actual processes at work.

Two members of our group, ecologists Thiago Rangel and Robert Colwell, had developed this simulation modeling technique for their studies of species diversity patterns. But no one had ever used this approach to study the diversity of human populations.

We decided to explore its potential by first building a simple model to test the degree to which a few basic processes might explain language diversity patterns in just one part of the globe, the continent of Australia.

Our colleague Claire Bowern, a linguist at Yale University, created a map that shows the diversity of aboriginal languages - a total of 406 - found in Australia prior to contact with Europeans. There were far more languages in the north and along the coasts, with relatively few in the desert interior. We wanted to see how closely a model, based on a simple set of processes, could match this geographic pattern of language diversity.

Our simulation model made only three basic assumptions. First, populations will move to fill available spaces where no one else lives.

Second, rainfall will limit the number of people that can live in a place; Our model assumed that people would live in higher densities in areas where it rained more. Annual precipitation varies widely in Australia, from over three meters in the northeastern rainforests to one-tenth of a meter in the Outback.

Third, we assumed that human populations have a maximum size. Ideal group size is a trade-off between benefits of a larger group (wider selection of potential mates) and costs (keeping track of unrelated individuals). In our model, when a population grew larger than a maximum threshold - set randomly based on a global distribution of hunter-gatherer population sizes - it divided into two populations, each speaking a distinct language.

We used this model to simulate language diversity maps for Australia. In each iteration, an initial population sprung up randomly somewhere on the map and began to grow and spread in a random direction. An underlying rainfall map determined the population density, and when the population size hit the predetermined maximum, the group divided. In this way, the simulated human populations grew and divided as they spread to fill up the entire Australian continent.

Our simple model didn't include any impact from contact among groups, changes in subsistence strategies, the effects of the borrowing of cultural ideas or components of language from nearby groups, or many other potential processes. So, we expected it would fail miserably.

Incredibly, the model produced 407 languages, just one off from the actual number.

The simulated language maps also show more languages in the north and along the coasts, and less in the dry regions of central Australia, mirroring the geographic patterns in observed language diversity.

And so for the continent of Australia it appears that a small number of factors - limitations rainfall places on population density and limits on group size - might explain both the number of languages and much of the variation in how many languages are spoken in different locations.

Applying the model elsewhere

But we suspect that the patterns of language diversity in other places may be shaped by different factors and processes. In other locations, such as Vanuatu, rainfall levels do not vary as widely as in Australia, and population densities may be shaped by other environmental conditions.

In other instances, contact among human groups probably reshaped the landscape of language diversity. For example, the spread of agricultural groups speaking Indo-European or Bantu languages may have changed the structure of populations and the languages spoken across huge areas of Europe and Africa, respectively.

Undoubtedly, a wide variety of social and environmental factors and processes have contributed to the patterns in language diversity we see across the globe. In some places topography, climate or the density of key natural resources may be more critical; in others the history of warfare, political organization or the subsistence strategies of different groups may play a bigger role in shaping group boundaries and language diversity patterns. What we have established for now is a template for a method that can be used to uncover the different processes at work in each location.

Language diversity has played a key role in shaping the interactions of human groups and the history of our species, and yet we know surprisingly little about the factors shaping this diversity. We hope other scientists will become as fascinated by the geography of language diversity as our research group is and join us in the search for understanding why humans speak so many languages.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why do human beings speak so many languages?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The thatched roof held back the sun's rays, but it could not keep the tropical heat at bay. As everyone at the research workshop headed outside for a break, small groups splintered off to gather in the shade of coconut trees and enjoy a breeze. I wandered from group to group, joining in the discussions.

# data[].attributes.body
This helps by telling me the benefits of bilingual speakers like me, and says how it could be healthier for the brain

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The benefits of a bilingual brain - Mia Nacamulli

# data[].attributes.body
This explains the languages that might be easier for English speakers which for me are a little weird like Afrikaans which i haven't heard of.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A SWEDISH FRIEND of mine speaks English and German with near-perfect fluency. "They're easy to learn," she insists with what I had believed to be sweet humility.

I'd always assumed the Swedes were just good at everything, hence their omnipresence on North American hockey teams. She firmly denied these superpowers. "English is a lot more like Swedish than you realize."

English is a part of the Germanic family and is linked to many European languages by descent or influence. It was also a big mooch in its formative years, with over 50% of its vocabulary stemming from Latin or French.

The result?

There are a lot of languages out there sharing common traits with English, which is great news when it comes to language study. When familiar structure or vocabulary is in place, the learning process becomes faster and easier. Hence my friend, the nonchalant polyglot.

Below are 9 of the easiest for English speakers to learn, as classed by the Foreign Service Institute.

1. Afrikaans

Afrikaans and English both derive from the West Germanic language family. Phonetics and pronunciation are comfortable for English speakers; the one wee hurdle is the Afrikaans "g", pronounced like the -ch in Bach.

Unlike English though, the Afrikaans language is not inflective. This means that with some memorized vocabulary, you can build sentences as you would a Lego tower, stacking words without worry of conjugation.

In Afrikaans, there is no conjugation of verbs (write, wrote, written), gender (think gato or gata in Spanish) or pronouns (my, mine; who, whose). In other words, you'll hardly be a grammar slave if you take up this logical language.

As with most Scandinavian languages, the biggest hurdle with studying Danish is in being able to practice. English is spoken widely and fluently across northern European countries.

Danish is said to be the hardest Scandinavian language to learn because of its speaking patterns. It is generally spoken more quickly and more softly than other Scandinavian languages. Danish is also flatter and more monotonous than English.

Grammatically, though, it's relatively easy. Danish has only nine verb forms, including the passive, which is peculiar to Scandinavian languages but familiar to English speakers. Danish has a lot of Germanic-based cognate vocabulary too: "Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday", in Danish, are " Mandag, Tirsdag, Onsdag."

Like all romance languages, French has a few difficulties for prospective speakers. There are more verb forms (17, compared to the English 12) and gendered nouns ( le crayon, la table). Pronunciation is especially difficult in French, with vowel sounds and silent letters.

The bright side?

Like all Romance languages, French's Latin derivations make much of the vocabulary familiar to English speakers (edifice, royal, village). Linguists debate the concrete number, but it's said that French has influenced up to a third of English vocabulary, giving it more lexical common ground with English than any other romance language.

Another romance language, Italian has the great feature of readability. Italian is written as it is spelled. For learners, reading comes fluidly once a few new phonemes are learned (like -ghi- or -ci-).

Italian words tend to end in vowels, which makes for really fun, flowing speaking, as you might hear in Italians speaking English ("that's-a my-a house-a").

Grammatically, the language follows typical Romantic structure, with gendered nouns and similar word order. One perk: Italian has fewer verb forms than French or Spanish.
Italian is widely seen as the language of gastronomy. Many English speakers like to "study" by reading Italian restaurant menus and salivating.

The language is structurally similar to Danish, but with pronunciation more familiar to English speakers. Norwegian, like Swedish, uses a tonal "pitch accent" to distinguish homonyms, stressing either the first or second syllable of the word. It's an easy concept to grasp: think "decent" and "descent" in English.

Verb forms are a relative breeze in Norwegian, with no conjugation according to person or number. The past tense is formed with a simple -e suffix; the future is formed with the auxiliary vil; the conditional perfect with ville ha. The passive tense is formed by adding a simple -s. It's a walk in the park compared to English.

Grammatically, Portuguese is similar to other Romance languages. There are fewer prepositions in Portuguese than in English (easy to remember!) However, their uses don't always have direct parallels in English (easy to mix up).

One great element of the language is that interrogatives are beautifully easy, expressed by intonation alone ("You love me?") If you can say it in Portuguese, you can ask it. What's more, in Brazilian Portuguese, there's one catchall question tag form: não é.

Pronunciation is fairly comfortable for English speakers, though the more nasal vowel sounds take some practice

The geographic dark horse of the romance languages, Romanian is often assumed to be the most difficult of the bunch, with its Slavic influences. Not so fast.

They say that Romanian is the closest living language to Latin, and has preserved a lot of Latin's grammatical structure. Articles are a bit of a puzzle in Romanian, with definite articles attached as a suffix to the end of nouns ( frate/ fratele, brother/the brother), while indefinite articles appear before nouns ( copil/un copil, child/a child).

Though the language has taken Slavic influences in its vocabulary, the language is still about 80% Latin-based, and full of cognates like sub (under) or obiect (object).

Spanish pronunciation is fairly easy for English speakers, with only ten vowel/diphthong sounds (English has 20), and the easy-to-master letter ñ. Like Italian, the orthography is clear and simple; words are written as they're pronounced, which makes reading easier. Grammatically, Spanish has fewer irregularities than other romance languages too.

A slippery element of the language (and all the Romances) is in false cognates: word pairings that sound the same as an English word, but mean something different. Particular means "private" in Spanish, and eventual means possible. See how that could get confusing?

Still, there's no shortage of people in the world to help you fix these slip-ups. With 330 million native speakers, it's the most popular language on this list.

A fellow Germanic language, Swedish has some vocabulary common with English ( mus for "mouse", kung for "king"), and a similar syntax too.

Pronunciation may be a struggle at first, with nine vowels (like ö or å) and the sje- sound, which is unique to Swedish. Once you master it, though, the language is surprisingly melodic.

Students of the language gripe about the complicated grammar system, but the syntax shouldn't be unfamiliar to an English speaker. In Swedish, the Subject-Verb-Object pattern is standard word order.

Also, verb formation uses many of the same patterns as English. The future tense, for example, is described with komma att + infinitive (will), or ska + infinitive (going to). And verb forms are normally constant, even if the person changes. I am, you are, he/she is would be Jag är, du är, han/hon är.

Honorable Mention: Frisian

Never heard of it? It's spoken by less than half a million people in the province of Friesland in the Netherlands. It wasn't included on the list because Frisian is rarely studied as a second language, so finding a textbook or tutor outside the North Sea would be near impossible.

Linguistically it is the closest language to English, stemming from the same subfamily of West Germanic languages. Phonetically, the phrases are almost identical. Uncanny.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A SWEDISH FRIEND of mine speaks English and German with near-perfect fluency. "They're easy to learn," she insists with what I had believed to be sweet humility. I'd always assumed the Swedes were just good at everything, hence their omnipresence on North American hockey teams. She firmly denied these superpowers.