Doesn't really surprise me, considering that we're supposed to be the melting pot. Though I'm surprised German is also spoken in my state of Alabama. In all my twenty-five years of living here, I only met two Germans, one from my high school, and the other from my college.
This popped up yesterday in one of my interpreter forums where many of those who faithfully lean to the curmudgeonly started griping about how this representation removed Spanish along with English in order to speak about other languages. A small flamewar erupted. Such are the goings-on in 'terp forums. I was surprised by the spread of Vietnamese through the midwest, and would have thought perhaps Mandarin or Cantonese for California, not Tagalog. I knew about the Russian pocket in Oregon, tho. I'm also sadly happy to see Diné Bizaad (Navajo) and Yup'ik still on the map. It would be tragic to see them die completely.
Very surprised to see Michigan's entry. I would have said Finnish or Polish ...guess I've been away too long! Shame only 4 states have Native American languages as their third most frequent. That's only 4 states that have retained indigenous languages to any great extent.
Not a very helpful depiction on several counts - there is no benchmark for "most commonly", so there is no way to judge how meaningful the percentage is of Texans speaking Vietnamese. There's also no accounting for geographical variations within states. For example, the Chinese-speaking population of New York State is concentrated mostly in New York City (and no small portion of it in my home borough of Queens). I doubt you'd find a lot of folks speaking Chinese in Norwich. Oh, and by Chinese, wouldn't we have to say Mandarin or Cantonese? Finally, there's also no way to see how many other languages are spoken, or how significant the next largest group may be. In New York, there are 140 languages spoken. Okay, I feel better, now.
I may have a distorted view given I live in tech-land, but my first thought was similar to Ed's, how did they measure this? In addition to a sizable population of people from Asia here, we also have a large Hispanic population. Perhaps more of the Asians are Vietnamese than I realize but I would have thought Japanese and Chinese made up a larger proportion.
Here's the Slate link and the source: American Community Survey As I suspected, they ask Language spoken in the home. This has some problems with people's cultural values if they want people to believe they speak English in the home, or if the family includes grandparents who don't speak English, or children the parents want to learn English, or neither. If you are a single person from Japan here to work or attend college, you may have American roommates. Or you might live alone but the conversations you think of to answer the question are when your friends come over. This is not to discount the interesting results.
You have clearly never been to New Mexico or Arizona. You can take classes on Dine at UNM and pretty much everywhere the AM dial has an all Navajo radio station. Dine Bizaad is in no danger of dying out.
Any idea why? Do you know what brought all these folks to Michigan? It can't have been the weather! Was it the car industry, or what?
Ginger, I am constantly amazed at your propensity to dig into...anything and everything. My hat is off to you. [need hat-tipping smiley?]
I do! Literally. All the forest you see in this photo is mine. Every time I've gone in there, tho, I get at least one leach on me. Sneaky little buggers. Spoiler
A lot of Arabs came over to work in the car industry in the early 20th C. And as with most big migrations, people from one country or region tend to settle in an area where there are already others from their same country or region, so that's how it went in Dearborn.
Thanks for that info. Well, live and learn. I didn't know that. And I was born and raised in Michigan (admittedly the north, not the Detroit area) and didn't leave till I was 37 years old.
