While Americans are infamous for not speaking a second language, according to the 2014 American Community Survey, a language other than English is spoken in 21% of households in the U.S. And multilingualism is on the rise: the number of Americans 18 years of age or older who speak more than one language rose from 9.2% to 15.7% from 1980 to 2014. This is good news for Americans. Aside from the enriching effect linguistic diversity has on culture, multilingualism has been shown to have positive impacts on health, especially in old age, and is associated with higher earnings on the job and better decision-making.
If you are not one of 15.7% of individuals who speak more than one language, there is still good news for you. The more speakers of other languages in your community there are, the easier it will be for you to practice and learn a new language. If you’re looking for inspiration (or a destination to immerse yourself in another culture), below is a selection of some of the large concentrations of non-English speakers in the U.S., taken from this analysis done by Slate magazine using the same American Community Survey data mentioned above. In many states, Spanish is the most widely spoken second language, which should come as no surprise, but when you look at the next most widely spoken second language on a state-by-state basis, you find some interesting results. (Also note that “Chinese” is a category that includes several languages, which are teased apart in these results, so Mandarin Chinese is counted as a separate language than Cantonese, as it should be.)
Tagalog: This is the most widely spoken second language after Spanish in 3 states: spoken by 706,785 people in California, 51,242 people in Nevada, 52,562 people in Hawaii.
Get started learning Tagalog.
German: Our German roots run deep and continue to be relevant for many Americans. In 16 states, including Idaho, Utah, Alabama and Ohio, this is the next to most widely spoken language behind Spanish. In fact, in North Dakota, German even beats Spanish!
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Arabic: This is the most widely spoken second language after Spanish in Michigan. In Dearborn, Michigan, where the Arab American National Museum opened in 2005, approximately 30% of the city’s inhabitants are Arab Americans according to the 2000 U.S. census.
Get started learning Arabic.
Vietnamese: There are three states in which Vietnamese comes in second behind Spanish: Texas, Oklahoma, Washington and Nebraska. The city with the most Vietnamese inhabitants (10.4% of the population according to the 2010 census data), however, is San Jose, California.
Stay tuned…our Vietnamese course is coming in November!
Chinese: If you’ve ever been to Flushing, Queens, it may come as no surprise that New York is the city with the largest ethnic Chinese population, and that in New York state there are 266,033 speakers of Mandarin Chinese. Given that there are 381,121 Mandarin speakers total in the U.S., that means that more than 2 out of 3 Mandarin speakers in the U.S. live in New York state.
Get started learning Chinese.