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Bill Richardson Shuns Speakers of Urdu, German, French, Italian, Swedish, Hindi, Mandarin, Yiddish, Arabic, Other Languages...

The Bench front page... Text of Bill Richardson's remarks at this morning's Obama news conference. I should say partial remarks: A portion near the end was spoken en Espanol, which should be seen as an affront to speakers of every other language - and the US has many people whose first language is neither English or Spanish. Richardson did not honor them by saying a little something in their tongue. Rather, he chose to be exclusive. Richardson, 61, was United Nations ambassador and energy secretary during the Clinton administration, and he is in his second term as New Mexico's governor. He also served seven terms in the House of Representatives. One of the nation's most prominent Hispanic politicians, Richardson pledged — in English and Spanish — to work to renew the economy. Chron.com... Live-Blogging Obama’s News Conference - Wall Street Journal Blogs Languages spoken in the US (with estimated number of primary speakers): English (215,423,557) Spanish or Spanish Creole (28,101,052) Chinese (2,022,143) French (incl. Patois, Cajun) (1,643,838) German (1,383,442) Tagalog (1,224,241) Vietnamese (1,009,627) Italian (1,008,370) Korean (894,063) Russian (706,242) Polish (667,414) Arabic (614,582) Portuguese or Portuguese Creole (564,630) Japanese (477,997) French Creole (453,368) Other Indic languages (439,289) African languages (418,505) Other Asian languages (398,434) Greek (365,436) Other Indo-European languages (327,946) Hindi (317,057) Other Pacific Island languages (313,841) Persian (312,085) Other Slavic languages (301,079) Urdu (262,900) Other West Germanic languages (251,135) Gujarathi (235,988) Serbo-Croatian (233,865) Other Native North American languages (203,466) Armenian (202,708) Hebrew (195,374) [Source: http://www2.ignatius.edu/faculty/turner/langus.htm]

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