The third most common language (with caveats, explained below) in each American state, after English and Spanish:
I found a few aspects of this curious:
- The gap in Chinese between Utah and the the West Coast states. I'm sure there's a story there (the Chinese speakers in Utah are presumably descendants of the railroad labourers, and obviously there's a larger Filipino population in Nevada than there are descendants of railroad labourers there), but I'm ignorant as to it.
- The wide distribution of German. I'd have expected French to be more widely distributed than German, since the French colonised this continent and the Germans didn't. Immigration has obviously had a large impact on the languages spoken here. But at the same time, so has colonialism, given the prevalence of Spanish here. There's undoubtedly some historical explanation for why Spanish is so much more heavily rooted here than French, but I'm again missing some context. French obviously took heavy root in Canada, though, and not just in Québec - there are many native speakers in the Maritime Provinces, in particular, and even some in Ontario and elsewhere.
- TIL that the dialect of French spoken in Louisiana is not considered a creole language/dialect, even though the term "Creole" is used to describe descendants of French settlers in the New World (Louisiana, particularly). I'm sure there's some explanation for this that I'm missing as well, but the terminology seems to have been chosen purely to confuse people.
- This is also the first I realised that there was a large population of French speakers in New England.
- I don't know what I expected Florida's third most widely spoken language to be, but it wasn't French Creole. I guess it makes sense, though, given our geographical proximity to Haiti.
- Arabic being Tennessee's third most widely spoken language is also... not something I expected. Michigan was completely expected, of course.
The above map may be something of an oversimplification, however, because the following map
from Wikipedia suggests that a few states have other languages as their second most prevalent:
(Map key: red = Spanish; blue = French; green = German; purple = Tagalog. Authors: Hihellowhatsup [JPG version], JCRules [SVG version]; CC BY-SA 3.0,
File:Second Most Prevalent Languages in the US.svg - Wikimedia Commons)
However, they may also be using different signifiers of prevalence (native languages versus languages spoken at home versus languages spoken overall); I haven't looked further into the data, and since I'm about to head off for dinner, I won't have time for now. There's definitely discrepancies, such as the bottom map listing German for SD and the top map listing Dakota for SD. Dakota makes sense, because it's literally the source of the name of the state, but
.