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The US, with approximately 250 million monolingual English speakers. China and India, both of which have about 1.4 billion people, or four times that of the US, have fewer monolinguals because of their many domestic languages.

In China, while the national language is Mandarin, most of the population also speaks other forms of Chinese. Even though the Chinese government calls these dialects, most are sufficiently different from Mandarin for linguists to consider them different languages.

India has two national languages: Hindi and English. In addition, there are many statutory provincial languages, each with millions of speakers. Examples include Bengali (106 million speakers), Urdu (62 million speakers), Marathi (99 million speakers), Telugu (94 million speakers), and Tamil (77 million speakers). It’s the norm in India to speak more than one of the hundreds of officially recognized languages.

Source: Ethnologue

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About the same. The average percentage of bilinguals among EU countries is 25%, whereas the figure for the US is about 23%.

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A lot more. The US has about 76 million bilinguals, whereas France has about 13 million.

If we used a more expansive definition of “bilingual,” such as the ability to hold a conversation in another language, rather than simply using a second language every day, European countries would most likely gain ground on the US. But because of the sheer quantity of US bilinguals, we should still have more than any EU country. The number of US bilinguals is around 76 million, while the total population of France is around 68 million.

Another reason the quantity of bilinguals in America is surprising is that the rapid increase happened relatively recently, in the last 50 years, which we will see in the next two questions.

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70%, or about 35 million out of the total 50 million people who fled Europe came to the US. They formed much of our national makeup and resulted in the highest percentage of immigrants the US has experienced, at 14.8% around 1900. During this century, there was little practical need to maintain heritage languages and they were mostly lost within three, and sometimes even two generations.

Source: David A. Gerber, American Immigration: A Very Short Introduction, 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021.

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1968 – present

In the first major wave of US immigration between 1840 and 1860, people came on sailing ships on a voyage that lasted several weeks. They were mainly from northern and central Europe, including from the UK, Ireland, and Germany.

The second wave of immigration came between 1890 and 1915 and again consisted of people from Europe, including southern and eastern Europe. These immigrants came on steamships on a voyage that took about one week, until a German U-boat sank the British passenger ship Lusitania. That triggered the US entering World War I and led to an abrupt end of the second wave of US immigration.

The third major wave from 1968 onward is a result of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, bipartisan legislation that went into effect in 1968. Over the next 50 years, the percent of immigrants went from less than 5% to nearly 14%.

For the first time, large numbers of immigrants came from Asia and Latin America, as well as from Russia, former Soviet nations, and the Middle East.

The result was slow at first, with the US bottoming out in its percent of immigrants in 1970 at below 5%. But beginning in the early 1970s and onward, millions of new immigrants came to the US, mostly in airliners.

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Canada, where 21% of its residents are immigrants. In Germany, the figure is 19%. In the US, the figure is 13.7%.

Some countries (including Australia, where 30% of its residents are immigrants) are actively recruiting and integrating immigrants to boost their economies, and to get a jump on the projected decline in global population later this century.

Sources: David A. Gerber, American Immigration: A Very Short Introduction, 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Immigration by Country 2024. Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson, Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline. New York: Crown, 2019.

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US, by far. The US has more immigrants than any other country (including Canada, Germany and Australia, which have higher percentages of immigrants in far smaller national populations than the US).

While having one quarter of the population of India and China, the US has more than 50 million immigrants. India has less than 10% of that, at 4.9 million immigrants, and China has only 1 million. In fact, net immigration goes the other way around for those two giants. India leads the world in citizens leaving, with 17.9 million emigrants, while China has 10.5 million emigrants, 10 times the number of its immigrants.

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India Of these three, India has the most languages—what linguists call linguistic diversity —but it is actually fourth in the world, with 458 languages. The US is next, in the fifth overall position, with 355 languages, and China is seventh, with 307 languages. All three of the world’s largest nations have a lot of linguistic diversity, which you might expect in a world with more than 7,000 languages.

The top three nations in terms of number of languages are Papua New Guinea, with 841 languages; Indonesia, with 720; and Nigeria, with 537. Hundreds of the languages tallied in this graph, however, are spoken by only a few people, and many are in danger of extinction.

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English – by a wide margin. English has about 1.5 billion speakers, although 75% are second-language speakers. By contrast, No. 2, Mandarin, with 1.1 billion speakers, has only 17% second-language speakers. No. 3, Hindi, with about 609 million speakers, is more balanced between native and non-native speakers, with 43% second-language speakers.

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US. The US has significant representation in 34 of the Top 40 languages. Germany ranks second, with significant representation in 15 of the Top 40.

The colors in this visual represent language families. Most of the little triangle-shaped mountains in China are red, to represent Sino-Tibetan or Chinese family languages. The amber colors in India are languages of India and its neighboring countries.