Europeans used to immigrate to America. At a certain point that slowed down very much.
By the end of the 19th century the European economy improved greatly so people weren't so desperate to emigrate. Still, there were a few places where times were tough, such as Sicily and Ireland, and we continued to receive a steady stream of immigrants from those places. Starting in the 1990s after Perestroika, people began immigrating from Russia and the other former constituent republics of the USSR such as Moldova, Georgia and Kazakhstan.
South America and Asia including the Middle East are more likely to move to America.
Mexico was our largest source of immigrants for many years (often desperately poor people who came in illegally, sometimes swimming across the Rio Grande and earning the nickname
mojados or "wetbacks"), but in the last generation they have reformed their economy and become a middle-class country. Net immigration is now negative: more Mexicans are going home than coming here. Today El Salvador is perhaps the most pitiful country in Latin America and many
Salvadoreños have come here to escape the violence (which our own country's policies helped foment) and find jobs. But yes, large numbers of people from Central and South America migrate to the USA. Aside from the poor people from El Salvador (and a few from nearby Guatemala), who make a dangerous journey through Mexico to cross the U.S. border on foot (sometimes illegally), the vast majority of
Latinos come legally, with passports and airline tickets.
There has been a wave of migration from various parts of Asia since the mid-19th century, when Chinese workers came to help build our huge new railroad network. Japanese people came to southeastern California to prove that it's possible to raise crops profitably in the desert. Many Koreans came after the chaos of the Korean War (that we made worse), and just like them a lot of Vietnamese came after we helped destroy their country.
Recently there has been a wave of immigration from Middle Eastern nations such as Iran, but there is much larger wave of Muslim immigrants from Africa.
And of course we have a huge population of immigrants from India. Here in the Washington DC region, working at a software house, seven members of my project team are from India and I am the only native-born America. My other two teammates are from Iran and Ethiopia.
England according to a friend is much like America in many ways after all thus no real reason for the British to move here. Only that they have much higher taxes.
Americans and Englishmen (and perhaps even the Scots and the Welshmen) get along reasonably well, especially since we speak dialects of the same language. But attitudes are different and it would take considerable adjustment for one to become truly content in the other country.
Wealthy Europeans have been moving here for decades, especially actors and other artists who can work anywhere. Although our own people love to complain about our "high" taxes, the USA is a
tax haven compared to Europe.
I would consider America mostly in communication English and Spanish. It is said French is spoken in some parts of America.
A dialect of French called "Cajun" (a corruption of "Acadian," the name of the French people who attempted to create a paradise called "Acadia" in eastern Canada and ended up being persecuted and moving to a warmer locale) is spoken in Louisiana, although virtually all of the Cajun people can also speak fluent English. Louisiana was once French territory along with several other states. French is also spoken in the Canadian province of Quebec, and not everyone there is totally fluent in English.
Those who speak Chinese who deal with English-speaking people learn to speak English.
"Chinese" is not a single language. Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghai, Fujian, etc. are not merely dialects but separate languages that are not intercomprehensible. So the Chinese people are accustomed to language barriers and to being multilingual. They seldom attempt to teach their language to other people, but rather learn the foreign language instead. Good business sense!
Many Muslims live in many parts of the world today. . . . It is common to meet one, with a heavy accept of Arabic.
We're more likely to meet a Muslim with an Iranian accent or any of several African languages. We do have immigrants from Arab countries, but they are vastly outnumbered by other Muslims. Remember: the ten nations with the largest Muslim populations are
not Arab countries: China, India, USA, Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Russia, Japan.
They have moved to the United Kingdom and as well as India and all other nations.
Actually India was conquered and occupied by Muslim armies. It was a Persian king who built the Taj Mahal ("Palace," literally "crown place," in Farsi).
Only that most of us English speakers don’t learn their language.
Many British people are bi- or multilingual. It is Americans who believe that everybody should learn to speak English. We're lazy and arrogant. Most of us don't start studying a second language until high school, at which time it's very difficult and most of us never get the pronunciation right.
Arabic is said to be a very difficult language to learn compared to some of the others.
It's a Semitic language like Hebrew and Aramaic. Semitic is a branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family (which also includes the Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, Egyptian and Omotic branches). Most of the languages in Europe are Indo-European, so they feel more familiar and comfortable to us.
I could learn to read or speak Chinese if I wanted.
It's much easier to learn to speak than most Americans assume, although it takes some effort to learn that
tone is phonemic, not just an expression of emotion. But it's not easy to read; you may be overconfident about that.
Understanding it at full speed is almost impossible.
Actually it's not. Chinese is not spoken quickly, and all the words are monosyllables so you don't have to figure out where one ends and the next begins. I never have trouble identifying the words I know when I hear people speaking Mandarin, and can pick up some of their conversation. I know a lot more Spanish, but I have a hard time understanding it because they speak so much faster and the words run together.
I would say English, Mandarin, Spanish, Hindi, Arabic.
It's hard to figure out how to rank Hindi. All Indians with a basic education have been taught it. They can read government documents, they can understand political speeches, and they can watch movies in Hindi. But the title of this thread is
Most Spoken, and very few Indians actually
speak Hindi. Not because they can't, but because
they don't like to. It's the regional language of the area around New Delhi, so to speak the language of the government employees feels like they're acknowledging those people as aristocrats.
So instead, when two Indians meet who don't speak the same native regional language,
they talk to each other in English. "Indian English" is now an officially recognized dialect of our language, like British, American and Australia/New Zealand.
