Which foreign language do you hear/use most?

Porthos · Which foreign language do you hear/use most?

Which foreign language do you find yourself using or hearing most in your everyday work environment? Which foreign language seems to have the most practical use in your country?

In my case, English and Spanish are used everywhere. At one of my jobs, (a grocery store), English is used predominantly, but Spanish is used among certain mono-lingual Spanish speakers, and a few of our customers. Farsi is used by three employees who are all of Iranian-extraction. One man from Iran is also fluent in French, although his English is very poor, and so I converse with him in very broken French, and I teach him English and Spanish words, correct his grammar, etc, and he shares his knowledge of French with me. So it's a mutually enriching relationship.

At my other job (an investment firm), English is basically the only language used. We have a few Spanish speaking clients, but only a handful compared to hundreds of English speaking clients. Our company is only active in English speaking countries like the U.S., the U.K. and Canada. So when dealing with others in the company by e-mail or telephone, I rarely encounter someone who is not a native speaker of English. The only other significant language within our company is French, because of our prescence in Quebec, and every once in a while, I will speak to French speakers on the phone or via e-mail, but nearly all of them speak fluent English.

This seems to be pretty standard. As an American, by far the three most important and practical languages are English, Spanish, and French, and in that order. Any other langauges, like German, Dutch, Nordic languages, Italian, Portuguese, etc, are of minimal importance compared to the far more practical languages of English, Spanish, and French, for those of us in North America.

What about in your countries?

Deborah

Also being a Californian, not to mention living a couple of blocks from the biggest Latino neighborhood in San Francisco, I hear Spanish all the time. I don't have occastion to use any foreign language in my work, though, except for a couple of occasions when I've typed a document that has some foreign names (Spanish, French, German) and I've been able to point out errors in spelling or missing diacritical marks. But this has happened probably only 3 times in the 7+ years I've worked at this law firm.

The other languages I hear most frequently on the street are Chinese (various dialects, I suppose) and, to a lesser degree, Vietnamese and Tagalog.

Occasionally someone at work will broadcast a request for help translating a letter or document, usually Chinese or Japanese.

Benjamin [inactive] · Re: Which foreign language do you hear/use most?

Walker

At work I use no other language than Swedish, basically. In the last 15 months I've had to speak English twice and both occasions were very brief. I've also spoken briefly to a couple of Danes in said period of time.

The foreign language I hear the most is Arabic. I reckon that Arabic would be of much practical use if you're a cop or a social worker or somebody that meets a lot of different people. Btw, I read that they teach Spanish at the police academy in LA. I suppose that a lot of companies use English frequently when dealing with customers and associates around the globe. Which foreign language(s) you hear/use the most depends on what your job is.

Wanderin

English, it's so boring

you even can't imagin how many english-speaking people live here for business purposes, but they even don't have any intention to learn Russian, saying, it's so difficult... blablabla Most of them even have never begun to learn it, personally I don't like such attitude.

Irrintzi

Irrintzi

A good link about the linguistical situation of the young lapurtarrak generation:

http://www.eke.org/euskara/soziol...dolescents_et_euskara_enquete.pdf

Deborah

Elaine

At work, the most spoken foreign language is probably Tagalog. Apparently, jobs in finance and accounting are very attractive to Filipinos (apart from nursing!

). Other languages I hear around here are Farsi, Chinese, Armenian, and Spanish. Immediately outside of work (Little Tokyo), I frequently hear Spanish, Japanese, and Korean (at least I think it's Korean). When I'm riding on public transport, forget about English, all I ever hear is Spanish and Armenian.

Deborah

I do occasionally hear Tagalog at work. It's the only one I hear regularly spoken among the employees.

David

With a large influx of Hispanic workers after Hurricane Katrina to my area, and my grandmother and father being Mexican, I hear quite a bit of Spanish daily. Unfortunately I am nowhere near fluent(yet!)

Lazar

Spanish is pretty common here in the Worcester area, and there's also some Albanian and Vietnamese spoken.

David

Cajun French and Vietnamese are also common in my area, although Cajun is unfortunately dying very quickly.

Walker

David

Porthos

My paternal great-grandfather was Cajun and Cherokee Indian. I believe he spoke a Cajun-influenced dialect of English, but not French.

David

Porthos

I believe he was born in Louisiana, but migrated to Arkansas by the time my grandmother was born. He married a Scots-Irish Arkansas woman, who spoke an Appalachian-English dialect.

Daniel

Well, living here in London, I hear various languages.

The Chinese languages, Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, the Indic languages (Urdu, Farsi, Punjabi, Gujarati, Hindi), Arabic, Greek, Turkish, Spanish (many variants), Portuguese (mostly Brazilian variant), Italian, French, German, Polish, Yoruba, Somali, etc.

In North London where I live, I frequently hear Turkish, Greek, Polish, and some Hebrew. But in South London where I work, I hear Spanish (mostly Latin American variants, especially Colombian), Portuguese (Brazilian), Arabic, Yoruba, Ga, Twi, Somali and Polish. And in Central London where the nightlife spots are frequented by me and my friends, I hear EVERYTHING!!

I even "see" Polish Sign Language and American Sign Language.

According to the 2001 census, there are over 300 immigrant languages spoken in London alone. It's not uncommon for some schools in London to have over 100 languages spoken by children (first language).

When I lived in Inverness, a town in the far north of Scotland, which is one of the most sparsely populated regions in Western Europe, we used to hear just Gaelic (apart from English) but due to the increase in immigration, Inverness started to get Arabic, Kurdish, Polish (Inverness now has their own (Scottish) newspapers published in Polish), Lithuanian, Estonian, Latvian, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Russian and Romanian.

Porthos

Daniel

Porthos

Daniel

Lip-reading is not really favoured by a lot of deaf people basically because it is hard work and needs a lot of concentration which can get very tedious and tiring. If you blink your eyes, you'll miss maybe one or two words but if you get tired from staring at somebody's lips for a long time then you'll just want to give up.

Although, I took a lip-reading course at high school, I don't really like lip-reading. Sometimes it does help, though. I would encourage people to learn sign language.

I had to learn to speak English to make communication with non-signing, hearing people easier so why not they learn my language, too?

I prefer to communicate in sign language wherever possible. British Sign Language is now officially recognised here in the UK. This means that now more and more Deaf people can have the right to access information in British Sign Language so I am taking advantage of this new law. For example, I have the right to a BSL interpreter in a job interview.

ddog800

Other than English (the obvious one for any American :P), I hear a good bit of Spanish, as there is a large Mexican population here in the south. I also quite often hear Thai spoken at this awesome Thai restaurant that we go to. There is also a sizable Vietnamese population here and I heard a bit of Vietnamese growing up going to school, though not so much any more as I don't run into them very often since school. And now I hear a lot of Afrikaans, as I'm learning to speak it, but only on the internet :P.

Llatai

There's a large Somalian population where I live, so I hear Somali. There are signs in English and Somali at one downtown hospital. I used to hear as much Spanish as English when I lived in New Mexico. I'd also hear Tewa and other languages of the local pueblo tribes. I hear Vietnamese, Hindi and Chinese because of the restaurants I like. I hear a bit of Russian too. I hear Spanish every time I call a business and get their automatic voice response, "para Espanol oprimo el ocho"....something like that.

Akoni

Here I hear Turkish and Arabic a lot and sometimes African Languages. Lot's of immigrants from Turkey and Morocco. :)

Elaine

Deborah

Llatai

fab

I work in a very international company, where most of employees are not french.

In the sub-group in which I work (about 15 persons), we have 1 Italian, 1 German, 1 Tunisian, 1 Chinese, 3 Russians, 1 Chilean, 1 Portuguese. Among the french people 3 are of french-italian origins, and the boss has Portuguese origins...

considered that most of our projects are in Russia, I can say that Russian is maybe the language I heard most. Italian is maybe second, since most of us speak it with our Italian collegue. Spanish, English, Chinese and German are often heard.

outside of the job, the foreign we heard most is of course English, followed by German and Dutch, since most tourists in France are from those countries.

Didier69

I live in southern France but something which can sounds strange. The foreign language I use the most is Swedish. Because my best friend is Swede. And I often speak with him by phone or Skype. Which explains it I love Swedish language. Jag älskar svenska språket.

Benjamin [inactive]

My situation has changed quite significantly since I answered this thread the first time, as I now live in St Andrews in Fife, Scotland. So I should probably answer it again:

I hear many languages on a regular basis, and it would be hard for me to name one foreign language which I hear the most. On the one hand, I hear Scots quite a lot, mainly spoken by older local people. But I'm not sure if I should really view that as a 'foreign' language because it's an officially recognised language in Scotland — it's just not my native language. On the other hand, I hear German a lot because there are a lot of students from Germany here and because there are always quite a lot of German tourists here. There are also a lot of Chinese students here, but I don't hear it so much because, unlike the German students, the Chinese students tend not to 'integrate' with the British students very much.

Of course, I also hear French and German a lot because I'm studying French and German and because I go to the French Society lunches every Wednesday, but I don't think that really counts.

Which foreign language do you hear/use most?

Re: Which foreign language do you hear/use most?