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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   1811 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 5, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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What are the most common second and third languages around you?

Where I'm at Spanish is obviously #2, but Vietnamese is #3. I think Arabic is probably the fourth- the various dialects of India are too... various to bump either of those.

In Malaysia it's a bit of a Starcraft situation with the 3 major races of Chinese, Malays and Indians (mostly Tamil). Plus English is probably the most common language. So the majority of Malaysian Citizens will tend to speak Malay, English and either Chinese or Tamil if they're from the applicable ethnic groups.

After those, probably Indonesian (Though Malay and Indonesian have the same Bahasa root language and could easily be argued to be dialects and/or mutually intelligible) is next then it's a wild mess of different immigrant groups and other nearby languages due to a hell of a lot of illegal and legal immigration. I think Filipino and Arabic speakers potentially would be the next bigger linguistic groups.

When looking at the country as a whole, I would suspect Polish and Hindi.

When looking at Dublin specifically, it might be Portuguese and Mandarin.

Tajik and Uzbek, if you mean second and third most common first languages.

Well, according to the Anchorage School District, the top 5 languages after English (for K-12 students, as of 2023) are:

  • Filipino
  • Hmong
  • Samoan
  • Spanish
  • Yu'pik

Presented in alphabetical order, not ranking. Based on an older Anchorage Daily News article from 2018 (which gave numbers, but had Korean in fifth place and Yu'pik a couple rungs down), the order should be:

  1. Spanish
  2. Hmong
  3. Samoan
  4. Filipino
  5. Yu'pik

English and Chinese, then a big gap, then probably Vietnamese and Tagalog.

Spanish is #2 by far. #3 is hard to say, but maybe Korean? I see Korean writing on some businesses and churches in my part of town, but can't think of any other foreign languages I see while out and about.

Well Japanese but it's everyone else's first language. In places like Namba (a heavily touristed enclave of Osaka) probably Chinese and Korean, not necessarily in that order. I've also met down there Germans and French and one Italian couple. Not as many English speakers around as there seem to have been in previous years, though English is probably the second language go-to for most Japanese. I also hear spatterings of Vietnamese and occasional Urdu (?) as there's a Pakistani extended family around town.

"Due to the federal shutdown", data.census.gov is not responding to queries. You may want to ask again when the shutdown has ended.

Right I don’t expect anyone to check census data. What are the common not-majority languages near you?

English is #2, and my gut feeling us #3 is Arabic, though the dated info I find puts Italian slightly ahead of it.

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