@Iri: Do you work in hospitals or have friends in the field? I was expecting that the ER doc would be working in Florida because Miami has some Brazilians.
Hmm, I think Portuguese or French would be best for seeing patients (compared to German) but to be honest, neither seem to be that important compared to Spanish in healthcare. Heck, even Spanish isn’t that important to see patients in most areas of the US.
The problem is that I don’t like French because of its spelling issues…
You could be a doctor in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania and speak German with the Amish.
@Iri, yes, but throughout its history immigrants have all “assimilated” and given up their mother tongues. We have seen this with the Italians, the Germans, the Asians (Chinese, Japanese, etc), and a lot of children and grandchildren of Hispanic immigrants no longer speak Spanish. Now, I think that Spanish will not die out like the other languages since their communities are heavily concentrated in a few states, but neither is it likely that Spanish will become very wide-spread like some think. I would love for Spanish to be be an official language of the US, but I doubt that it will happen. (Though we don’t have a federal language, many states have elected for English to be the official one. About 30/50 states, I believe)
Usually it works out like this. I don’t know any grandchildren of immigrants that are native speakers, unfortunately. And if I did check the statistics, I think that I would be supported by the data.