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Speaking American
So I had some fun last night playing with this map. It's basically just another way to view the data collected here, the chief advantage being that counties where more than 10% of the population speaks a language other than English at home are colour-coded, so it's easier to spot some intriguing islands of multilingualism in a sea of English.
Take, for example, Jefferson County, Iowa. In the map it's coded blue for "Other" and mousing over will tell you that the most-spoken LOTE (Language Other Than English) there is Hindi. So far I can't find any explanation for this. I had better luck with a couple of anomalies from my home state. When I saw that Sullivan County, in North Central Missouri had the highest proportion of Spanish-speakers in the state, I reasoned, "Must be a meatpacking plant." Yup--Premium Standard in the county seat of Milan[*]. I was more confused by the prominence of an "Other West Germanic language" in nearby Scotland County until I saw a population breakdown by religion: 20% Old Order Mennonite.
Mostly, the distributions are what you'd expect (provided you know about, for instance, the Acadians in Maine or the Hmong in Minnesota), but there are some surprises. I wasn't surprised to find a high proportion of non-English-speakers in the eastern Aleutians, but I wasn't expecting to find that the most-spoken LOTE was not Aleut but Tagalog. And though I knew there were a lot of LOTE-speakers in Miami, I wouldn't've put the proportion above 72%.
[*] First syllable as in "mile", i.e. /ˈmaɪlən/.
Take, for example, Jefferson County, Iowa. In the map it's coded blue for "Other" and mousing over will tell you that the most-spoken LOTE (Language Other Than English) there is Hindi. So far I can't find any explanation for this. I had better luck with a couple of anomalies from my home state. When I saw that Sullivan County, in North Central Missouri had the highest proportion of Spanish-speakers in the state, I reasoned, "Must be a meatpacking plant." Yup--Premium Standard in the county seat of Milan[*]. I was more confused by the prominence of an "Other West Germanic language" in nearby Scotland County until I saw a population breakdown by religion: 20% Old Order Mennonite.
Mostly, the distributions are what you'd expect (provided you know about, for instance, the Acadians in Maine or the Hmong in Minnesota), but there are some surprises. I wasn't surprised to find a high proportion of non-English-speakers in the eastern Aleutians, but I wasn't expecting to find that the most-spoken LOTE was not Aleut but Tagalog. And though I knew there were a lot of LOTE-speakers in Miami, I wouldn't've put the proportion above 72%.
[*] First syllable as in "mile", i.e. /ˈmaɪlən/.
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Maybe it's because of this?