A map of the languages of the USA (2011) | Hacker News Reader

A map of the languages of the USA (2011)

census.gov

35 pointskafkaesque17 comments

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This is rather disappointing, and reminds me of an XKCD: http://xkcd.com/1138/

I was only looking for the changes I was aware of and they are fairly discernible:

-Huge Polish population in Chicago and Michigan

-Huge Asian (Chinese, Japanese, Tagalog, Korean, Vietnamese) population in Hawaii

Other than that it was mostly a population map to my eyes.

A couple anomalies, French in Louisiana stuck out. And Atlanta?

German is more distributed in rural areas rather than just concentrated in big cities.

French Creole in Tennesee? What's up with that?

Haitian immigrants?

Why would french in Louisiana stick out? It's named after the former King of France(Louis), was once part of New France, and also where a lot of French Canadians(the Acadians) were deported to when the British took over.

I think he meant it stuck out as in it was a noticeable difference from the normal population distribution, rather than stuck out as in didn't expect.

Natch. Likewise unsurprising, Germans (probably amish or mennonites) spread throughout rural areas.

Francophile Atlanta was a shock though. Friends of mine who lived there insist they met no French speakers. But apparently they're there somewhere. Maybe post-Katrina refugees, or a Haitian immigrant community? No idea.

Another fascinating French-speaking sub-population in the US is the French Canadian American communities of Maine and Vermont, where many families still speak French at home after all these years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Canadian_American

Try zooming in, and look at variations within regions of fairly uniform population density. Then you can see interesting things.

I thought the same thing, but it's much more interesting when you zoom into the population centers you're interested in. For example, the distribution of French Creole vs. Russian in the Washington D.C. metro area is pretty interesting.

A little bit disappointed that none of the Indian languages have been listed. Wikipedia places Hindi above Persian and Japanese among the most spoken languages in USA.

Yes, I'm very surprised that Hindi/Urdu are not in the list.

Perhaps they aren't as concentrated as Iranians are?

This data might be interesting for folks who want to do language tutoring for foreigners.

As many as 800 languages are spoken in New York, making it the most linguistically diverse city http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_York_City

very cool - did not see an option to see everything all at once?

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