Midland, MI - aka Babel

We went to the library today to return 8,000 kids books (and check out another 6,000).  While there, we always go and play with the toys they have there, and there are generally other kids there, too.  Since it's Saturday, the crowd was pretty good, and for most of the time we were there, there were 4 other families there, and, as it turns out, we were the only ones who spoke English exclusively with their kids.

But the even more interestingly, the other 4 families were speaking 4 other languages, and I couldn't identify any of them.  We had one family that looked European, but wasn't speaking anything from Western Europe or Scandinavia.  There was a woman with her 2 kids that looked African, and could have been speaking African French, but maybe not.  There was an Asian man with his 2 daughters which was speaking either Chinese, Korean and Japanese (and I maybe could have figured that one out, but they spoke very little), and finally there was a Middle Eastern family and I can't even make a reasonable guess at what they were speaking.  Persian?

Now, I'm certainly not a linguistic expert or anything, but I can recognized a fair number of languages, particularly many of the most common ones in the US.  Wikipedia (2000 census) tells me that 82% of the US claims English as their mother tongue.  (96% claim to speak English either "well" or "very well" and as far as I could tell, everyone at the library fits the description.)  The next 19 most common languages are (in order): Spanish, Chinese, French, German, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Italian, Korean, Russian, Polish, Arabic, Portuguese, Japanese, French Creole, Greek, Hindi, Persian, Urdu and Gujarati.  It's not surprising that there is a lot of drop off in numbers along that list, with #2 (Spanish) having 10 times as many speakers as #3 (Chinese) and 100 times as many as #19 (Urdu).

If only I had spent my time teaching Shannon and the girls Portuguese, then we'd finally be able to fit in around here!

(For the record, I think it is awesome that we had people from 3 or 4 continents speaking 5 different languages at the local library today.)

edited to, you know, use complete sentences.