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boganvegan t1_j5y8ac9 wrote

What about English? Even back in 1991 I think there were children of parents with different mother tongues, living in major cities who learned English before other languages and spoke English at home.

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stupidbutgenius t1_j5yfihw wrote

English is on there at 0.022% or about 250k. I would have expected higher as well.

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realLRM t1_j5yzuwe wrote

List is of Mother Tongues not languages spoken

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stupidbutgenius t1_j5z07le wrote

I'm aware, but I know a couple of Indians who grew up speaking English at home and I thought it was more common - but it is probably just that the people who migrate from India to English speaking countries are far more likely to have been English native than the general population.

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zookeeper25 t1_j62qi7c wrote

People from different mother tongues marrying each other and their children speaking English at home is a fairly unique phenomenon from the last 10 years. 30 years ago those children were probably speaking Hindi at home.

Secondly, there is absolutely no correlation between those speaking English at home and those migrating to English-speaking countries. Almost everyone who has received a decent level of education has studied English in school. It’s not their mother tongue but it’s their second or third tongue - and that’s good enough to immigrate. Almost All university level education is in English. So the more educated people that you have encountered in your country have all studied a lot of their subjects in English

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boganvegan t1_j5ypjwg wrote

I missed it in the long list, this is based on the 1991 census, I'm sure it's higher now

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