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Comment by Xylakant | Hacker News Reader

Yes, indeed they are. But they all share a common language. It's a bit like Germany, Switzerland and Austria or even the german states themselves. We all share a common language so it we've seen the same movies, read the same media, etc. Certainly it's on a larger scale than the german states, but it's on a smaller scale than europe. If I travel 200 km to the east I'm in Poland. My GF comes from a village close to the belarussian border. I can pick the car, drive there in 6 hours or so and while it's Europe and even still EU, I can't even begin to talk to her parents or pretty much any other person in the village. I don't understand a single word they say, I have very little clue about how their life was and still is. If I drive 1000 km to the south I crossed at least 4 borders and heard at least as many languages on the way. So the proper comparison would be to compare texas to mexico or any middle american state.

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"But they all share a common language"

Ha! You haven't been to Watsonville, California or just about anywhere along the border with Mexico, have you?

Try to follow the conversation between somebody living in my village and the next one 5 km further down the road. Or a bavarian and someone from Hamburg. They wouldn't understand each others dialects. You know what I mean. Even the folks down on the mexican border get fox news and understand plain old english.

Things tend to be pretty ok in western europe where most can agree on english, but don't forget that a large part of europe was behind the iron curtain and didn't get to learn english until 1989. The majority of people in the east doesn't speak any english at all.

In the city I named (Watsonville) there are many people that don't understand English and many of the signs there are in Spanish. This city is in the heart of agricultural California so most foreigners (and Californians, to be honest) never see it.

It is only about 60 minutes from Silicon Valley and yet has more culturally and linguistically in common with Mexico in many ways.

The people 150km to the south from here speak Sorbisch [1]. They have their own culture, their own schools even though they're mostly german national. Still, they get german TV and mix with "regular" germans on a daily basis. However, the people 200km to the east all speak polish and don't get any german tv. Which group is more likely to have some common ground with me?

The question is not if there are enclaves of other cultures and languages within a larger body of uniform people since on a small enough scale you will always find enclaves: Chinatown, Little Italy, or Kreuzberg in Berlin[2] but how uniform the population is. No population is truly uniform and I don't think anyone pretends that West-Coast Americans and East-Cost Americans are the same as Texan, but I dare to postulate that a common overarching government and a common official language leads to a greater degree of uniformness than 20+ official languages and a loosely knit set of contracts. A norwegian is most likely more different from a greek than a New Yorker from a Californian.

[1] The Sorbs are one of a couple recognized german minorities which explains their special status http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorbs [2] Strong turkish/arab minority

I haven't been to the particular locations you name, but my experience with multilingualism in the US is that it's more like "Spanish spoken here" than "Does anyone speak English?"

Right, so that's 2 languages (English & Spanish). There are currently 23 offical working languages in the EU.

And I'm sure if you live in Watsonville, California, you can get your tax forms in English, right? This is definitly not the case within the whole of the EU and the EU offical languages. (e.g. someone in Ireland could not get their tax forms in Swedish).

Language isn't the only cultural barrier. Lets stop being obstructive - the argument is sound. There are many sub-cultures in North America. They have profoundly different outlooks.

The bigger lesson is, political boundaries suck at defining people or culture.

There's way more than two languages: http://www.census.gov/hhes/socdemo/language/

If you live in a larger urban area in the US, odds are that you can encounter several dozen languages in a day.

Yes, clearly there are many different languages spoken in a large, populous country like the USA.

However that's not at all like the European Union which has to publish all EU Directives in 23 languages, and each country has 1 or 2 or 3 or 4 official languages for their region. In the USA, English is the lingua franca, and official stuff can be done in English. There is no language that you can use all over the EU that will work in all (or sometimes any) official capacity.

Several dozen? Probably only in New York.

Three to five separate languages per day, as you would encounter in any other moderately multicultural/multinational locale? Yeah, any large urban area will do that.

"If I drive 1000 km to the south I crossed at least 4 borders and heard at least as many languages on the way. So the proper comparison would be to compare texas to mexico or any middle american state."

If I drive 1000 km to the southwest, I'm still in Texas... :) If I wish to drive to the nearest ski resort, I spend most of the drive time getting across the damn state! If I want to hear about 40 different languages, I just go to the nearest shopping mall or to the cafe in the next building.

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