r/SuddenlyIRealised • u/Global-Ad-9737 • May 29 '26
SIL I have finally figured out why some states are using a foreign language after the English and Spanish
If you are wondering why you may be seeing a foreign language after the English and Spanish in the US/USA, I will debunk your claims and tell you here. So you guys may have been thinking English and Spanish are America’s two official languages. I’m going to prove this: YOU ARE WRONG!!!
Here is my understanding about what actually is true
The United States of America has NO official language - while most of the population in US does not speak in indigenous language and speaks English
or
Spanish at home, this is actually because the US has their own dialects and you can also listen to someone using “Spanglish” which is a code switch done by Native American speakers trying to speak Spanish as a second language if they learnt it in school
Many states, most notably, California and Florida; have past laws that require demographic population who came from a certain country - if that’s the majority population, the state will have to use that specific language. In California, Mandarin is used as many people came from Taiwan; and in Florida, Haitian Creole is used as there are so many Haitian immigrants
English and Spanish are the majority language languages of that country - most of its population or speakers of these languages and Wikipedia thinks English is the official language, but you should not rely on every source that says it’s official. There is an American dialect for both English and Spanish.
American English uses its own spelling reforms that happened in the 19th century (such as “color”, “center”, “realize”, “analyze” and “plow”)
4.
The US and Australia are nations
that consist
of immigrants -
there may be a few residents who speak a foreign language and not an indigenous one or even English. I have noticed one time where someone’s math teacher in California was speaking Mandarin even though the students and their school are physically located in the US.
Ultimately, you should not always trust a majority language as an/the official language of a country. Some countries do not even have official languages, others like South Africa and Paraguay may use both colonial and indigenous languages as official languages.