re: Is the USA the most diverse super power?

Multi-culturualism is the death of any culture.

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75 percent of people speak English as their first language, which is somewhat higher than a place like China, which has less ethnic diversity, but more language diversity. America certainly has racial, ethnic, and religious diversity, but the degree of its language diversity is probably higher than other places where ethnic diversity and language diversity are closely linked.

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I got into this a couple of nights ago in a different thread.

Saying China is "diverse" simply because of variations from Han to other sub-ethnicities is like saying we are diverse because of the difference between a Louisiana Cajun and the Scandahoovians where I live. There are absolutely differences, but in the spectrum of the whole world, these are still slivers. (There is a more pronounced variation in some areas, e.g., Tibet, Xinjiang, etc., but these are by far exceptions.)

As for language, you better speak Mandarin in China if you are going to function. Written language is somewhat irrelevant, since the dialects will generally all use the same ideograms. Your local government office in Ürümqi is not going to cater to your Uyghur language preferences, but you will find shops and other private enterprises catering to their customers, just like in Vietnam town in Houston.

I always get sideways when people rant about Americans only speaking English. I've lived in Japan and Singapore. I've worked for companies HQ'd in Austria and Germany. I've been to 50+ plus countries and all the continents except Antarctica (and missing that one bugs the crap out of me). Everywhere I have gone, the language of business is English. For everyone else in the world, their choice of a second language will almost always be English. What is mine supposed to be? I can get around in Japanese, German, and Spanish (by which I mean I can order a beer and find the loo), but business meetings are always in English, even between parties where English is not their primary language (e.g., a Japanese and a German).

As for the specific issue of China, give it another couple of decades. Mandarin will be cemented in as the lingua franca, with a substantial part of the population conversant in English. Academics will fret about dying languages, but the evolution to commonality will continue to converge on English.