Without even a hint of what you want to do with your "new projects", that's not possible to answer. Python is a sensible answer for many cases, for instance. Go is pretty plausible for some projects but would immensely weak for others (for its age, it has great library support, but it is still a young language), etc. C++? D? Ocaml? C#, perhaps on Mono? How exotic are you looking to be? In the rich, diverse world of programming languages, the JVM is merely one participant. It's large, but I do not think everything else merely lives in its shadow or anything, it is not that dominant. Not even close, really. (C++ may once have stood atop the world, but nothing else has quite pulled that off since.)
C and C++ are still the dominant languages, by far. They're still actively "standing atop the world".
Almost everything truly important today is written in one of them, or both of them. The usable, production-grade implementations of PHP, Python, Ruby, JavaScript, Lua and Perl depend on one or both, as well. Most JVM implementations depends heavily on them, too.
When they're providing the foundations necessary for even their competitors or alternatives, it inherently makes them even more valuable and effective.
The Objective C number isn't coming from server development so one can infer a lot of Java's popularity is coming from Android.
In a perfect world, Google would have picked a great up-and-coming language for Android AND brought the tooling up to parity with Java as they developed Android. But they made the optimal choice at the time to be able to provide a very mature and powerful (n.b. did not say "friendly") toolchain at launch with the relatively small team they allocated to Android.
Android isn't built around a JVM. The Android Dalvik VM has properties that make a small OS that runs many VM instances possible. The JIT compiler strategy is tuned to increase performance without a big hit to battery life. Dalvik is the best VM for mobile devices. So if you think the VM has a strong influence on the popularity of a language, Java in Android will be a leading language until some significantly better JVM language gets good enough tooling in the context of the Android SDK to challenge it.
In my opinion, the Java ecosystem has grown to the point where C++ is no longer "the undisputed master". It is, at least, in dispute. TIOBE isn't perfect, but if C++ were still the undisputed master, Java would not handily out-score it, for instance. (If your response is to start expanding on the imperfections of TIOBE, stop and reread that sentence a few more times, carefully. Exactly what my if-then says, and what it doesn't say, are important to my point.)
I think if what you're suggesting were true, then we'd see Java being used for far more "foundation" software, as well as for higher-level software. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to avoid using at least some Java-based software at nearly all times. This isn't what we see, though.
Java has mainly been relegated to enterprise apps and Android development. Now, that's not to say those are small markets. It isn't a "dead" language in any sense. But its scope is quite limited when compared to C and C++. We no longer hear the hype about entire operating systems written in Java, like we used to. There are no major relational database systems written in Java (Derby and H2, for example, are still quite limited). Even for web development and business app development, many people are moving away from it to alternatives.
Yet we still see C and C++ being used at all levels of software development, for software that sees extremely widespread use, in many different domains. They're used for developing the most critical and widely-used device drivers, OS kernels, libraries, application software, server software, compilers, interpreters and so on.
Whether you're using a server, desktop, laptop, netbook, smartphone, tablet, or even many embedded devices, you're almost constantly using a huge amount of software written in C and/or C++. Given this context, Java is a minor player, at best.
JRuby has for a long time been a usable, production grade Ruby, and, while CRuby has made big strides in recent version, is still ahead in many ways (including threading, due directly to the JVM.)
(I think MagLev is production ready -- and used in production -- and its based on Smalltalk.)
So at least in Ruby's case, its not the case that the usable, production-grade implementations depend on one or both of C and C++.
