Who speaks what languages in the US?

13 October 2005

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It always strikes me as peculiar, that the U.S. is often described as a monolingual English-speaking place, when tens of millions of people in the country speak so many other languages. Did you know that people in Idaho speak over three dozen languages other than English? That over 86,000 people speak Polish in Chicago? Or that almost half of New York City's residents don't speak English at home?

We're not doing well at matching that capability with the country's language-related jobs, so ironically there are language shortfalls in some places -- but that's a different issue. The fact is that only the less populated or rural areas of the country are exclusively English-speaking, places like Appalachia, Deep Dixie and parts of the Midwest. In most of the country, and especially in the larger cities, multilingualism is the rule.

How do I know that? Because the Modern Language Association has given us a way to find out what languages are spoken where -- at the touch of a button. With data from the 2000 Census, they created interactive maps and tables that show the linguistic composition of the entire U.S., state by state, county by county, city by city -- down to the neighborhoods defined by a zip code.

You can see how languages are distributed across the country, and zoom in on places that have speakers of a language you're interested in. You can call up tables that rank the fifty states according to numbers of speakers for each language. If, for instance, you want to know where Vietnamese is most spoken you'll see that California, Texas, and Washington are the top three states.

If you look at Minnesota, which you probably think of as full of Scandinavians, you'll find Spanish, German and the Southeast Asian language Hmong as the most spoken languages -- three times as many speakers of Hmong as there are speakers of Swedish, Norwegian and Danish. You could look up Androscoggin County in Maine and find that there are 13,951 speakers of French and 271 speakers of German -- not to mention almost 30 other languages. You can compare the number of Yiddish speakers in New York with the number in Miami. The Map even gives a breakdown of speakers above and below the age of 18, which may be a clue to a language's future or a clue to whether new immigrants have come to stay and brought their families.

There are dozens of ways that planners, academics, corporations, librarians or just plain folks can use this information, now that it's in the form of an electronic map. Marketers who want to reach speakers of Urdu or Korean can find the ZIP codes where a mass mailing might be most effective. Government agencies can use it, let's say, for providing social services, or for disaster preparedness. If you're the Department of Justice, the Map can tell you in which languages to inform new Americans of their rights and responsibilities. If you’re the Office of Trade and Information, it can help you tell a company with interests in China where to find Americans who know the language. And think of this: if you're learning a language: you could find a place to practice it, without spending money to go abroad.

Although there's a wealth of information at the Census Bureau, the Bureau didn’t at first publish all the details about language. The MLA's contribution was to get the detailed information, make it easy to find... and easy to use. And that was a marvelous gift for the rest of us.

What the Language Map shows is that the U.S. is far from being a place where languages other than English go to die in the melting pot. If you still think the U.S. is a vast island where English is essentially the only language spoken, go to www.mla.org, click on Language Map, and type in the zip code where you're hearing this program. That's mla.o-r-g. You may get a surprise.

That's the language thought for today, which comes from David Goldberg of the Modern Language Association. And this is the Five-Minute Linguist at the College of Charleston, in cooperation with the National Museum of Language. If you have a question about language or just want to make a comment, visit our website at www.cofc.edu/linguist. And keep in mind that wherever you are, and whatever you do, language makes a difference.