Non-English and non-Spanish languages in the USA

Last month, Ben Blatt posted a series of maps on Slate, showing the most commonly-spoken language other than English in each state (and more besides). Inspired by those maps, below I show the equivalent map at the census tract level, which is a finer level of detail than counties. You may have to wait 15 seconds or so for Google to process the data and display it for you. The numbers come from the 2000 Census, so it's a little bit out of date, but it's the most recent dataset that I could find that has this much detail.

Click on any "tract" to bring up its county, the most commonly-spoken language other than English and Spanish, the percentage of people speaking that language, and the population (the latter only counting those aged 5 years and over). The tract code is a string of digits and will likely only be of interest to people wanting to check the original data. (See also the equivalent map including Spanish.)

	German
	French (incl. Patois, Cajun)
	Chinese
	Italian
	Korean
	Polish
	Arabic
	African languages
	Russian
	Portuguese or Portuguese Creole
	Japanese
	French Creole
	Other Indic
	Other Native North American
	Other Slavic
	Other Asian
	Other Indo-European
	Greek
	Other West Germanic
	Serbo-Croatian
	Gujarathi
	Vietnamese
	Laotian

It is a little unfortunate that many languages are lumped together in large categories. The Native American languages are divided into Navajo and "Other"; all African languages are called "African languages", and so on. Still there is plenty to see in the map – languages that are listed individually plus Chinese account for around 86% of all the tracts containing at least one speaker of a language other than English and Spanish.

The legend at right shows the most commonly seen languages or language categories in the map, which together account for 91% of all the tracts with at least one speaker of a of a language other than English and Spanish. The opacity of the shading is related to the percentage of people in the tract who speak the language in question, with solid colour being used for anything over 30%.

The data is available from the wonderful National Historical Geographic Information System, which is run out of the Minnesota Population Center at the University of Minnesota. I used Table NPCT010C from dataset 2000_SF3a, along with the corresponding shapefile for the tracts.

Posted 2014-06-01.