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Re:Americans Work 25% More Than Europeans, Study Finds by lovich on Tuesday October 18, 2016 @04:59PM (#12738664)
I guess it cant be compared at all since the US doesn't have any official languages. De jure != de facto
Re:Americans Work 25% More Than Europeans, Study Finds by _benedict on Tuesday October 18, 2016 @05:58PM (#12739105)
You seem to be missing the majority of my point, but I agree it's an arbitrary distinction as a technicality.

However, 32 US states do declare English as their official language. That's certainly more homogenous than the EU, the original point of contention. Just 2 of 28 EU states declare their official national language as English, and only one of these has English as their only official language (indeed, only the UK has English as their official EU language, which means English may no longer be an official language at the EU level after the UK leaves).

In the US, half of all states have English as their only official language.

This is all barely to the point, though (language is only a small part of culture). While the US may not be homogenous, it is clearly more homogenous than the EU, and by a large margin. The attempt to suggest otherwise was just absurd.

Re:Americans Work 25% More Than Europeans, Study Finds by jdmichal on Tuesday October 18, 2016 @06:04PM (#12739145)
In the Brexit threads, it was discussed that the EU language selection is not really representative of populous or culture. Each country could only select one, and multiple entries didn't add anything. So many countries who may have potentially selected English didn't, because it was already selected by another country and it would be a "wasted" selection. For instance, Ireland has more English speakers than Irish speakers, yet it declared Irish as its EU language. It may very well switch to English when Brexit completes.
Re:Americans Work 25% More Than Europeans, Study Finds by _benedict on Wednesday October 19, 2016 @05:59AM (#12742444)
Your definition of "many" may need a revisit - this is simply not common. Ireland is the only egregious case, and I covered that in my comment. The Maltese population really does speak Maltese, as well as English. Every other language I can see in the official EU list is genuinely a primary tongue of one the nations in the EU.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_European_Unio...