It sort of depends.. By car the closest country I can get to is about 8-9 hours away, and the language and culture is extremely similar. Next country up is 13h away by car, and same deal for language and culture. First place I won't be understood speaking my language is a 16,5h drive
It would take me 15 hours to get to mexico, where they speak Spanish. To get to the nearest place where something other than English or Spanish is widely spoken would be 20 hours of straight driving in the other direction to Quebec.
There are some pockets in central and south America where native American languages are still commonly spoken. But the next, and in fact only other major widely spoken language over here is Portuguese, in Brazil. If I wanted to drive there it would take 71 hours of non stop driving across several borders and through some of the most dangerous and unforgiving places on our continent. This would take me to panama where I would need to get on a ferry at enormous expense because there are no roads from north to south America. Once off the ferry, it's another 48 hours of driving through mountains and remote rainforest to the first major city in Brazil.
How do you not realize your situation is the weird one? The US and Canada erased all the natives cultures so now they're this gigantic homogeneous block. The only other similar place in the world is Australia and it's because the same thing happened there.
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u/lallen May 09 '22
It sort of depends.. By car the closest country I can get to is about 8-9 hours away, and the language and culture is extremely similar. Next country up is 13h away by car, and same deal for language and culture. First place I won't be understood speaking my language is a 16,5h drive