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    A look at the language shift in North America
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    A look at the language shift in North America

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    22 Comments

    3. grownask on

      This type of map has been posted so so so many times and everytime it gets corrected in comments that French isn’t the second most spoken language in Louisiana for years. It’s also Spanish.

    4. hbhfl on

      its not a shift with language, and those are immigrants who will ultimately assimilate and speak english like everybody here

    6. LupusDeusMagnus on

      According to the US Census of 2020, the non-English language breakdown of;

      ND state is:

      Most Common Non-English Languages

      1. Spanish 14,612 households (2.01%)
      2. German 4,605 households (0.633%)
      3. Other Native Languages of North America 2,630 households (0.361%)

      LA state is:

      Most Common Non-English Languages

      1. Spanish 195,221 households (4.51%)
      2. French (Incl. Cajun) 62,417 households (1.44%)
      3. Vietnamese 22,554 households (0.521%)

      NH state is:

      Most Common Non-English Languages

      1. Spanish 35,239 households (2.66%)
      2. French (Incl. Cajun) 15,637 households (1.18%)
      3. Portuguese 5,711 households (0.431%)

      For HI I couldn’t find data breaking down the top languages:

      Most Common Non-English Languages

      1. Ilocano, Samoan, Hawaiian, or Other Austronesian Languages 122,558 households (8.99%)
      2. Tagalog (Incl. Filipino) 59,329 households (4.35%)
      3. Japanese 37,041 households (2.72%)

    10. The_Oregon_Duck on

      Louisiana and North Dakota have Spanish as their second most spoken, it’s been said numerous times in the comments under these posts.

    12. mr_shaboobies on

      I’m highly skeptical this map is accurate. I live in the Canadian prairies and the number of French speakers is really quite small other than maybe Manitoba. I’d bet Tagalog or Hindi/Punjabi would be second most popular after English.

    14. Ypres_Love on

      I’ve always wondered who these German speakers in the midwest are. Are they very old people who were born in the US to German immigrants in the early 20th century and grew up speaking it at home? I don’t think there were many German immigrants after the first world war.

    15. the_eluder on

      So in order to show a shift, you would need to have a couple of maps showing the change over time.

    17. Quantum_Heresy on

      A “shift” denotes a change in one state of affairs to another. What is the “shift” being presented here? From what I can tell this trend — the in-migration and dispersion of native Spanish speakers and the attrition of large non-English-speaking communities (German, Italian, French, &c.) during the same period — has been going on for decades. Usually its helpful to show a ‘before’ and ‘after’ image as a point of comparison when attempting to illustrate a language shift.