What Language Does Your State Speak?

The May 13, 2014 issue of Slate includes a fascinating article by Ben Blatt called, “Tagalog in California, Cherokee in Arkansas.” This article is a follow-up to a post Ben wrote in April about viral maps. He happened to pick the topic of languages other than English that are spoken in American homes. This topic is of great interest to those of us in the language arena and I’m glad that Ben chose it as his example. For his source data, Ben used the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS).  To indicate additional languages spoken at home, respondents to the ACS survey filled in a blank box with a self-selected language. It was not a check box or a radio button. Because of the variations, there are some flaws in the way the Census Bureau treats different languages. For example, some people wrote “Chinese,” as the additional language spoken at home. Others put “Mandarin” or “Cantonese.” Unfortunately, this lack of consistency skews the results a bit, but the information is still fascinating. Overall, the most commonly spoken language other than English is Spanish. This is not a surprise. It gets more interesting when you look at the languages other than English or Spanish.   The most commonly spoken language (other than English or Spanish) in California is Tagalog. In New York, it is Chinese. In Texas it is Vietnamese. Ben then goes on to drill down into the most commonly spoken Native American languages, the most commonly spoken Scandinavian languages, the most commonly spoken Indo-Aryan languages, and the most commonly spoken African languages. What language does your state speak? Is it different from what you would have guessed?

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Val Swisher

Val Swisher is the Founder and CEO of Content Rules, Inc. Val enjoys helping companies solve complex content problems. She is a well-known expert in content strategy, structured authoring, global content, content development, and terminology management. Val believes content should be easy to read, cost-effective to create and translate, and efficient to manage. Her customers include industry giants such as Google, Cisco, Visa, Facebook, Roche, and IBM. Her fourth book, “The Personalization Paradox: Why Companies Fail (and How to Succeed) at Creating Personalized Experiences at Scale,” was published in 2021 by XML Press.

Val is on the Advisory Board for the Technical Communications Program at the University of North Texas. When not working with customers or students, Val can be found sitting behind her sewing machine working on her latest quilt. She also makes a mean hummus.

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