Reshared post from +Yonatan Zunger
This is a great little dive into US Census data: What's the most commonly spoken language in each state? Ben Blatt looks at the most common languages other than English and Spanish (top two in most states), and other breakdowns, like most common Native American or Scandinavian languages.
In case you're wondering why Chinese doesn't show up on this map, it's because the US Census separates "Chinese" into Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghainese, etc., and none of those languages individually is bigger than Tagalog. This is a good separation: Mandarin and Cantonese speakers can't understand one another any more than English and German speakers can.
For political reasons, if you do linguistics work anywhere around China, you have to refer to these as "dialects" of Chinese; that's because the Chinese government considers it very important to highlight that the Chinese people are one people, etc. The languages do share a single writing system, but normally in linguistics it makes sense to think of a written language as being separate from its spoken languages: the two tend to be very different beasts and differ quite a lot more from one another than you would expect, even in very writing-centered worlds. In fact, when people write in a spoken mode or speak in a written mode it's often very noticed. (And decried as a "corruption of English," as though written English were the only "real" English and the spoken language which people actually use is some kind of half-language) If you look at the spoken languages, the Chinese languages are related to one another, but they're very different, and their history and relationship is fascinating.
Oddly, though, the US Census didn't do the same with Arabic, which is actually about two dozen different languages. The situation here is a little different: "Classical Arabic," the language of the Koran, is universally used for written Arabic, and it's also used for very official things such as news broadcasts. It's related to all of the local Arabic languages (Moroccan, Egyptian, Libyan, etc., etc.), but it's about as different from them as Latin is from Italian, and they differ from each other like Italian from Spanish. Classical Arabic is something you learn in school, not (in general) from your mother; but if you put an Egyptian and a Moroccan in a room together, they'll probably talk to each other in Classical Arabic, because they won't understand each other's native tongues at all.
Arabic is often referred to as a single "language," and even native speakers will refer to their varieties as dialects, even while cheerfully admitting that they can't understand one another at all — which is exactly what defines different languages. However, because people aren't as widely aware of this, Arabic is even more likely than Chinese to be listed as a single language, which probably has something to do with its showing up on the map as the third-most-common language in Michigan. (It would be a perfectly good answer if we were looking at a map of language families, in which case you would also see a lot more Chinese and Indo-Aryan languages, I'll bet)
If you want to know more about the Arabic and Chinese languages, these pages have great maps and introductions:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Arabic
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Chinese
What Language Does Your State Speak?
Last month, I wrote about the fun and the pitfalls of viral maps, a feature that included 88 super-simple maps of my own creation. As a follow-up, I’m writing up short items on some of those maps, walking through how I created them and how they succumb to (and hopefully…
A picture is only worth 999 words. While the picture is certainly illustrative, it doesn't highlight the percentage of people who speak that language (usually the third most popular language in the state in question). If German is spoken by 10% or 5%, or 2% of the population, then it may not be worthwhile to learn the language.
Fascinating information about Arabic, by the way.
+John E. Bredehoft Yeah, I was not altogether serious about the suggestion. (I have never had the opportunity to speak German with someone here in Colorado, which is just as well as high school was a loooooong time ago. Though, ironically, I was in high school here for one of my years of German, and went to a language camp over a long weekend where we only spoke in German.)