Akorbi helps you achieve your business goals when you need multilingual support, whether you’re expanding into a target market with a foreign language or you need help interpreting a foreign language in your existing customer base. Today’s blog from Akorbi showcases the top 11 languages we work with for bilingual customer service as part of our business process outsourcing (BPO) services.
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Dialects of Portuguese
1. European Portuguese
Around 1.25 million people speak Portuguese in the United States, and it’s the sixth-most spoken language in the world with around 215 million native speakers. Portuguese is also one of the fastest-growing languages in the world.
2. Brazilian Portuguese
The largest concentration of Portuguese speakers doesn’t live in Portugal. They live in Brazil, where Brazilian Portuguese is the official language. The largest concentration of native Portuguese speakers in the United States is in Massachusetts, where this group makes up the state’s largest linguistic minority. BPO for multilingual support is vital for a large population of Portuguese speakers who settled in the northeastern United States.
3. Portuguese Creole
Portuguese Creole originated in Cape Verde, a group of islands forming their own country off the northwestern coast of Africa around 375 miles west of Senegal in the Atlantic Ocean.
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French Dialects
4. French
Around 2.1 million people in America speak French, which makes them the fourth-largest linguistic group in the U.S. Only English, Spanish, and Chinese are spoken more in the United States. French is mostly spoken in southern Louisiana (Creole) and in New England states like Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire (near Quebec in Canada).
5. Canadian French
Most residents of Quebec in Canada speak French, and French is one of two official languages for Canada. It makes sense for American companies who deal with Canadian firms or customers to have BPO services utilizing bilingual interpreters.
African Languages
6. Somali
African languages are some of the fastest-growing languages spoken in the United States. Approximately 150,000 people in America speak Somali. Minneapolis, Seattle, San Diego, and Columbus, Ohio, contain the largest concentrations of Somalis in the U.S. The Minneapolis area alone has around 74,000 people who speak Somali.
7. Swahili
Swahili is the most popular African language spoken in the United States. It’s understandable why the 2020 U.S. Census will, for the first time, highlight five African languages on its forms (including Swahili). Swahili comes mostly from the African nations of Tanzania, Uganda, and Kenya.
8. Amharic
Amharic is the principal language of Ethiopia. The largest pockets of Amharic speakers live in Washington DC, New York City, Seattle, Dallas-Fort Worth, and Columbus, Ohio. Although exact numbers are hard to determine, the highest estimates figure around 460,000 ethnic Ethiopians living in the United States, making it an important language for BPO services.
9. Kirundi
Kirundi is spoken by around 9 million people worldwide, and it comes from the nations of Burundi, Tanzania, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
10. Kinyarwanda
Kinyarwanda is closely related to Kirundi. It is the native language spoken in Rwanda. Around 12 million people speak this language.
In a Class by Itself
11. Arabic
Arabic is spoken by approximately 315 million people worldwide. More than 1.1 million people in America speak Arabic at home, making Arabic a formidable language to consider for multilingualism and BPO services. Arabic is the fastest-growing language taught at American colleges and universities.
Akorbi & BPO
Akorbi works in more than 170 languages to meet your exact needs when communicating with your target audience or employees who speak foreign languages. Our BPO services can save you time and money because we can reduce or eliminate the need to hire dedicated staff to handle your multilingual requirements. Contact Akorbi or call 1-877-4-AKORBI for more information on our interpretation and BPO services.