A trilingual US

Have the United States more or less the same as OTL but with the contiguous United States divided into English speaking States, French speaking ones and Spanish speaking ones. The english speaking ones include all the thirteen colonies plus various other states adjacent to them. The french speaking ones include Luisiana etc while Texas, California and the rest of the south west speak spanish. Puerto Rico is given statehood too and is spanish speaking.

What language(s) would Florida, the Midwest, the Pacific Northwest, Alaska and Hawaii all speak?

Would spanish survive in the Phillipines?

Would Native American and immigrant minority languages benefit in this situation?

Would Americans be good at learning each other's languages, or as bad as in OTL?

Which out of the three would be the most dominant both at a federal level and throughout the world?

How would it affect American politics throughout its existence and up to the present day?

Would America be more or less conservative and would race be less of an issue?

How would it affect American culture and identity?
 
Assuming the U.S is the same as it is now in all regards, The Midwest would have a lot of German speakers along with some Swedes,Norwegians and Finns in certain areas. No clue on the Pacific Northwest though I imagine it would be German too. Germans are everywhere.
 

iddt3

Donor
Assuming the U.S is the same as it is now in all regards, The Midwest would have a lot of German speakers along with some Swedes,Norwegians and Finns in certain areas. No clue on the Pacific Northwest though I imagine it would be German too. Germans are everywhere.

German/Spanish/English is much more likely than French/Spanish/English imo, French never had more than a few enclaves, while German was everywhere
 
Assuming the U.S is the same as it is now in all regards, The Midwest would have a lot of German speakers along with some Swedes,Norwegians and Finns in certain areas. No clue on the Pacific Northwest though I imagine it would be German too. Germans are everywhere.

Now you got me an idea for a timeline. The Amerikan Reich.
 
Assuming that the US has all of its OTL territory means that we need a PoD after 1867. IMO, you can easily get a multilingual US in that timeframe:

1. English (75% of the population): All states and federal territories
-PoD: Duh.
2. Spanish (10% of the population): California, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Texas, Florida, New York
-PoD: OTL immigration patterns
3. German (6% of the population): Montana, Nebraska, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana
-PoD: In OTL, German was widely spoken in the Midwest until WWI. With no anti-German sentiment, German could survive until OTL, although it would be a very small minority.
4. Chinese (3% of the population): California (Bay Area), New York (NYC), Oregon (Portland), Washington (Seattle)
-PoD: No Chinese Exclusion Act, or at least a less extreme version



EDIT: Added percentages of the population that would be native speakers of the language. The leftover percentage is made up of the hundreds of other languages spoken in the US.
 
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German/Spanish/English is much more likely than French/Spanish/English imo, French never had more than a few enclaves, while German was everywhere

If what I have read before is accurate it's fairly easy too considering a lot of German Americans still spoke German until that whole World War I thing.
 
It would be interesting if there was still German spoken, maybe much of the north would speak it. Maybe the US siding against Britain would lead to Irish Gaelic or Ulster Scots being spoken by Irish.
 
It would be interesting if there was still German spoken, maybe much of the north would speak it. Maybe the US siding against Britain would lead to Irish Gaelic or Ulster Scots being spoken by Irish.

The Amish speak German. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_German_language

Scots is basically English (debate on whether it is a sister language or dialect).
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_language

Also the revolutionary war and 1812 didn't cause Americans to give up English which is what it would take for the Irish to be able to continue with Gaelic. Especially bearing in mind that a large amount of the Irish immigrants to America around the mid 19th century were Gaelic speakers. They had to learn English to get jobs etc.

edit, If the Irish concentrated into one area then the language may survive. Diffusing all over would cause them to need to learn whatever was the lingua franca of the area they were settling in.
 
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If you're set on French you'd basically need to include Canada. Have France get serious about settler colonization and send more people to Canada and Acadia, and pretty much any Europeans to Louisiana and the Ohio Country. That's key, a solid belt of French settlement standing in the way of British expansion. The French still don't build and train a brilliant navy, so Canada still goes the way of OTL. Meanwhile Spain responds to French incursions by building a string of border forts and settlements expand around them, maybe even a bit north of OTL.

British-American colonies don't feel threatened by France anymore, and rebel as OTL. France supports them, with its greater western presence, and Canada is captured by a combined force. Most Canadians are hostile to returning to French rule and wary of being outnumbered by English-speakers, so Canada languishes a poor republic until statehood negotiations are concluded. One of Canada's conditions is a guarantee of the French language and accustomed laws, and so an amendment is passed allowing states to decide their own language policy (as long as it does not conflict with personal freedom).

Attachist movements arise in the Pays d'Haute and Louisiana, advocating membership in the American Federation under Canadian terms, even as pioneers and missionaries head west, skirting around Spanish territory and hitting the Pacific. Eventually anti-French revolts occur as colonials riot against an empire that they feel is impoverishing them. France cuts its losses and negotiates the sale of its remaining North American territories while retaining trade rights in New Orleans.

Independence movement/civil war in Mexico. The Federation takes Florida, split between an Anglophone North and a Spanish-speaking South. Spanish authorities evacuate Mexican royalists to the northern provinces, Coahuila y Tejas, Nueva Mexico, California, Chihuahua and so on. Eventually these lands split off to join either the Republic of Mexico or the American Federation. In a complete coincidence, these now have the exact border as the OTL US-Mexican one. Also, Mormons still migrate to Utah, for funsies.

Fast forward and we see major cities speaking creoles, and with mass communication a creole of creoles is beginning to form, with an English core and structure and heavy influx of Franco-Spanish vocabulary. The upper class and aspirants speak 'pure' English, French and Spanish and learn to get comfortable with all three.

If Canada isn't an option, neither is French, but German might work.
 
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