Quote:
Originally Posted by iheartthed
Is that really surprising to anyone? I don't speak French so the nuances of accents and culture aren't obvious to me in French, but Paris seems easily the most "native" of those three cities. And by native I mean the degree of native-born people in the overall population.
There don't seem to be a lot of languages other than French and English (distant second place) spoke in Paris. In London and New York (especially) you constantly hear languages other than English being spoken.
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Immigration in Paris is less visible than in Anglo-Saxon cities, because society here is not organized around communities. The immigrants usually do not gather in communities. They don't own a neighborhood. There is no Little Italy, Little Tokyo, etc. There are only few exceptions (Wenzhou Chinese community in the 3rd arrondissement of Paris, Sri Lankans in some streets of the 10th arrondissement, etc). But by and large, people are mixed, they live and frequent mixed neighborhood, where the lingua franca is French.
You don't hear the accents, but I do. I was walking in a street in the Marais, and I passed by two White women chatting in front of a building's entrance door, and when I was near them I realized one had a Portuguese accent. This would have been lost on non-Francophones. To you it would have been very French and provincial, to me it sounded multicultural.
If we look at the numbers, the wider metro area of Paris has numbers not too far off from London (27% for Paris, 33% for London), and certainly above many metro areas in North America. But our immigrants tend to be less conspicuous (although in recent years it has changed a lot with the arrivals of many Black African migrants crossing the Med on boats, who are very visible now in the center of Paris).
As for languages, here are languages you can hear almost everyday in Paris (in no particular order): Lingala (I hear more and more Lingala these days), Wolof, Bambara, Maghreban Arabic, Kabyle (which would probably sound to you like Arabic, but it's a totally distinct language in fact), Tamil, Latin American Spanish (more and more), English (often American accent), Tagalog (always very loud), Russian (more and more, although like most people I cannot to this day distinguish Russian from Ukrainian).
Only at my gym, which is in a residential part of the city, there are always guys there speaking Maghreban Arabic (these are actually young white-collars who studied in engineering and business schools in France, immigrant themselves, came to France to attend these schools, it's not the low-skilled children of immigrants you see in the banlieue), Russian or Ukrainian (couldn't tell), Latin American Spanish, English and Tagalog (the Filipinos make a point never to speak French, we have to speak English to them). That's the languages you can hear almost everytime I go. More occasionally I've heard Vietnamese, German, Italian, Portuguese, and some other languages I can't remember now. There's also a guy I see everytime I go who is I believe Serb (judging from his physique and from the football jersey he wears sometimes), but he speaks only (slightly accented) French with the guys there.
I can't remember that my gym in the US and in London were more multicultural. To me, roughly as multicultural as my diverse gyms in London, and more multicultural than my gym in California.
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