Japanese tops the list of the Asian languages most Americans want to learn, according to a new study from LTL Language School, reports the Good Men Project.
The study is based on 900 combinations of 24 key word searches from 42 East and South Asian languages. The school connects interest in Japanese with the popularity of anime and manga.
The Travel Daily Media found that Korean is the second most popular language. As you might suspect, the Korean wave or Hallyu contributed to the interest as K-pop and K-dramas increase in popularity.
Rounding out the top three is Mandarin. China’s prominence on the global stage has peaked American interest in the language.
That’s followed by Hindi and Thai.
The results of this study based on internet searches overlaps with one released in December by Duolingo.
That firm released a list of top 10 most popular languages studied in 2023.
In that study as well, Japanese and Korean were the most popular Asian languages. The two ranked fifth and sixth on the list of most popular languages overall, not just Asian languages.
Hindi came in eighth and Chinese nineth.
Census data reveals that 1 in 5 people in the United States speaks a second language, according to VOA. That translates to 68 million people.
“My parents also spoke English at home but they really tried to keep it, like I would speak English at school during the day and at night I would only speak Vietnamese just so I could keep the language and keep my proficiency at it up and not lose it,” says Jenny Nguyen whose parents immigrated from Vietnam. “When I was younger, I didn’t understand the importance, but I think now I’m very glad that I’m able to speak and write at such a proficient level.”
Chinese, Tagalog and Vietnamese are among the top 5 languages spoken at home with Spanish the most popular and Arabic also in the top 5.
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