Where's Waldo fans: find Tagalog
August 21, 2013 8:59 AM   Subscribe

 
I grew up in a neighborhood wtih a rough equilibrium between the Italian, Chinese, Mexican, Puerto Rican, Orthodox Jewish and Russian/Russian Jewish populations. To this day when I see an old person speaking fluent English, I get weirded out.
posted by griphus at 9:12 AM on August 21, 2013 [2 favorites]


I never realized how large a Brazilian population lives around the Boston area. But apparently their diaspora (is there any ethnic group that did not have some kind of diaspora? my google fu is weak for this) had a great number end up in Framingham.

And apparently, you can be from so far north in Maine that you speak French. My inner 10 year old feels justified.
posted by Hactar at 9:16 AM on August 21, 2013


Add "Portuguese" and that description fits Norfolk County, Massachusetts as well; I'm really surprised that they say the most common non-English language is Chinese here. Where are all the Chinese speakers in Norfolk County?
posted by Curious Artificer at 9:16 AM on August 21, 2013


I like the linguistic islands in the middle of angloland. I didn't realize the US still had so many German-speaking places. And how come Tompkins County, NY, is so strongly Chinese, and Jefferson County, Iowa, so strongly Hindi?
posted by pracowity at 9:17 AM on August 21, 2013


I'm a little surprised that there are almost 7% non-english speakers here (Allegheny Co., PA). I've lived here for almost a quarter century and am still weirded out by how white and non-hispanic it is here. Taxi drivers, hotel maids and landscape workers are all native English speakers; heck even most taco places are English speaking here.
posted by octothorpe at 9:25 AM on August 21, 2013


The way I understand this, the map doesn't actually tell you what percentage of the percentage of non-English speakers the majority is in. For Tompkins, my hypothesis is that because ~20% of the town's population is Cornell University students, there's a lot of languages spoken than the average non-immigrant community and Chinese just made it to the top of that list. We have no idea how that's split though.
posted by griphus at 9:26 AM on August 21, 2013 [2 favorites]


I hardly agree with the sentiment of, "This is America, speak English." That being said, how is it that other ethno-linguistic groups like Germans, French, Chinese have only minor pockets in which it's still preserved as the at-home language, but Spanish is apparently strongly dominant?

Is there just more Spanish-language culture and media, and thus less pressure to adopt English?
posted by explosion at 9:28 AM on August 21, 2013


I never realized how large a Brazilian population lives around the Boston area. But apparently their diaspora (is there any ethnic group that did not have some kind of diaspora? my google fu is weak for this) had a great number end up in Framingham.

Portuguese in New England is a really fascinating story! Early on, there were immigrants from mainland Portugal working in the whaling industry who ended up in Martha's Vinyard and Nantucket, and to some extent in the cities around there too. Since then, every time there's been a wave of immigrants from some Portuguese colony or former colony — Azores, Madeira, Angola, Cape Verde, Brazil, wherever — enough of them have gravitated to the area to maintain a decent-sized Portuguese-speaking population.
posted by Now there are two. There are two _______. at 9:29 AM on August 21, 2013 [7 favorites]


What the hell, I would *totally* have taken a Native American language in high school if it had been offered!
posted by Mooseli at 9:38 AM on August 21, 2013


That being said, how is it that other ethno-linguistic groups like Germans, French, Chinese have only minor pockets in which it's still preserved as the at-home language, but Spanish is apparently strongly dominant?

Because there are more people who speak Spanish?
posted by vacapinta at 9:38 AM on August 21, 2013 [4 favorites]


Yay! Go Navajo! In case anyone was wondering what "other Native American languages" those green bits denote:

Neshoba County, Mississippi: Choctaw
Big Horn County, Montana: Crow (and a bit of Cheyenne)
Glacier County, Montana: Blackfoot
Dakotas: Lakota, Dakota, other things that are Sioux but they don't call it that

That being said, how is it that other ethno-linguistic groups like Germans, French, Chinese have only minor pockets in which it's still preserved as the at-home language, but Spanish is apparently strongly dominant?

That's just because a lot of the Spanish is relatively new to the US, so they haven't had much time to lose it.

Besides, German and French aren't particularly accurate descriptions of what those languages are. The German is Pennsylvania Dutch or similar and the French is Cajun.
posted by Sys Rq at 9:40 AM on August 21, 2013


That being said, how is it that other ethno-linguistic groups like Germans, French, Chinese have only minor pockets in which it's still preserved as the at-home language, but Spanish is apparently strongly dominant?

I'm going to guess it's largely due to back-and-forth mobility between the U.S. and most of the Spanish-speaking countries. The extralegal status of many of these migrants probably adds to it as well -- if you're not going out into the community for fear of deportation, you're less likely to pick up the community language to the point that you speak it at home.
posted by Etrigan at 9:40 AM on August 21, 2013


explosion:Is there just more Spanish-language culture and media, and thus less pressure to adopt English?"

Just because they speak Spanish at home, doesn't mean they don't also speak English.
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 9:41 AM on August 21, 2013


That being said, how is it that other ethno-linguistic groups like Germans, French, Chinese have only minor pockets in which it's still preserved as the at-home language, but Spanish is apparently strongly dominant?

Because there are far more recent immigrants from Spanish-speaking countries than German, French, or Chinese speaking ones. And while Spanish-speaking immigrants do take slightly longer to reach English fluency and give up Spanish than other groups,
immigrants today are learning English faster than the large waves of immigrants who came to the United States during the turn of the last century. Fewer than half of all immigrants who arrived in the United States between 1900 and 1920 spoke English within their first five years after emigrating while more than three-quarters who arrived between 1980 and 2000 spoke English within the first five years. During their first 20 years in the United States, the more recent arrivals, including those from Spanish dominant countries, also learned English faster than immigrants from the first two decades of the 20th century.
Tomás R. Jiménez, Immigrants in the United States: How Well Are They Integrating into Society? [pdf]. Basically by the third generation immigrants of all types speak English fluently or natively, often speaking only English.
posted by jedicus at 9:42 AM on August 21, 2013 [1 favorite]


On reflection, "give up Spanish" was poorly phrased. Apologies.
posted by jedicus at 9:45 AM on August 21, 2013


And Jefferson County IA is home to Fairfield, which is where the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's followers built a university. Apparently in Maharishi Vedic City — just outside Fairfield proper — "the city's residents include about 1,000 pandits from India who live on a campus on the edge of the city."

The total population of the county is only 16,000 and change, so those thousand visiting scholars are almost 10% of the county all by themselves.

As I understand it there's been a good bit of friction between the long-term residents — basically all poor-to-middle-class white Anglophones — and the university, which has been this weird gentrifying force in the sort of rural area where gentrification isn't usually a huge issue. (Greg Brown wrote a snarky-ass song about it, which is how I first found out about the whole situation. Chorus: "There's a whole lotta money in Fairfield / Fairfield / Fairfield / A whole lotta money in Fairfield / And I'm gonna get me some." One verse: "They meditate and get focused / Focused / Focused / They do a little hocus-pocus / And the money just rolls in." There you have it.)
posted by Now there are two. There are two _______. at 9:45 AM on August 21, 2013 [1 favorite]


Also, it's worth remembering that the Southwest was once Mexico, that Florida juts into the Caribbean, that a lot of agricultural workers are Hispanic, etc.
posted by Sys Rq at 9:45 AM on August 21, 2013 [1 favorite]


Very interesting to see where the Amish are. I am making an assumption that the German and Germanic languages in rural counties in Indiana and Ohio is due to Amish groups. Is that the same in South Dakota?
posted by readery at 9:46 AM on August 21, 2013


SD would be Hutterites, I think. That's what the Montana ones are.
posted by Sys Rq at 9:47 AM on August 21, 2013


In the Dakotas, the Germanophone population is most likely Hutterite.
posted by jeudi at 9:47 AM on August 21, 2013


Found Tagalog. It was not the Bay Area, as I expected. What are all those Filipinos doing in Alaska?
posted by maryr at 9:51 AM on August 21, 2013 [2 favorites]


You're going to get anomalies like that in low-density areas. That could almost be one Filipino.
posted by Sys Rq at 9:52 AM on August 21, 2013


...Chinese have only minor pockets in which it's still preserved as the at-home language...

Asian populations tend to be concentrated in major metropolitan areas like NYC and San Francisco, whereas the Spanish-speaking population is considerably more spread out. But, because major metropolitan areas concentrate every ethnicity, there's also a lot of Spanish-speaking people in those areas as well.

The way this map is generated, it identifies the county strictly by the top language. There's four times as many people in the US identifying as Hispanic/Latino than there is Asian, so in every metropolitan area, there's a good chance there's more Spanish-speakers than any other language. So it's not "minor pockets," it's significant populations in places where other populations are even more significant.
posted by griphus at 9:53 AM on August 21, 2013 [1 favorite]


It does become a little misleading when the divisions are strictly by county, because you can end up swallowing up several huge minority groups into one giant glom. In all of Los Angeles County, there's no question that Spanish is the dominant minority language, but the San Gabriel Valley has the highest concentration of Asian-Americans in the country, mostly Chinese, and that's a hell of a lot of people to erase in favor of the top language.
posted by Diagonalize at 9:54 AM on August 21, 2013 [2 favorites]


You're going to get anomalies like that in low-density areas. That could almost be one Filipino.

I take that back. Filipinos in Alaska are indeed A Thing.
posted by Sys Rq at 9:58 AM on August 21, 2013 [1 favorite]


Where are all the Chinese speakers in Norfolk County?

Newton. Har har. But keep in mind that this is at home. Plenty of Chinese professionals in the Greater Boston area who speak fluent English but still speak Chinese when they pick up that call from home. I've always loved when internationally derived coworkers get phone calls from home because all of a sudden that slightly withdrawn biochemist falls away as an irritated Chinese father asks his daughter how she lost her retainer AGAIN. And I know it's a retainer because that's not translated.

And There are two _______. nailed the Portuguese in Massachusetts.
posted by maryr at 9:59 AM on August 21, 2013


The French along the Quebec border in Vermont, NH, and Maine isn't really surprising if you think about it. Again, this is what people speak with their parents. The French in Louisiana is much more surprising to me - is that really French? Or is it Creole?
posted by maryr at 10:01 AM on August 21, 2013


The French in Louisiana is much more surprising to me - is that really French? Or is it Creole?

Creole and Cajun (also from Canada!), plus probably some sprinklings of French French from France, too.
posted by Sys Rq at 10:04 AM on August 21, 2013


...that's a hell of a lot of people to erase in favor of the top language.

Yeah, the more I look at it, the more I realize how useless the map is for identifying anything except Spanish-speakers in places with not-insignificant Spanish-speaking populations. If there was a way to uncheck "Spanish," it'd reveal a considerably more intricate picture.
posted by griphus at 10:05 AM on August 21, 2013 [1 favorite]


What falls under 'other Indo-European languages'? Curious about Macomb County, MI, where that's the dominant non-English alternative.
posted by wikipedia brown boy detective at 10:05 AM on August 21, 2013


The little aqua dot on the Greater Providence Metro Area that they have listed as "other languages" is Portuguese/Portuguese creole - tons of first generation immigrants here from Portugal, Azores and Cape Verde. When I was a kid, the cable operators had a Portuguese language channel.
posted by Slap*Happy at 10:19 AM on August 21, 2013


What falls under 'other Indo-European languages'? Curious about Macomb County, MI, where that's the dominant non-English alternative.

According to Data-Driven Detroit (page 23 of a 53-page PDF), it's probably Chaldean or Arabic, but those are Afro-Asiatic. Albanian is the highest "other Indo-European language" at fourth. I think someone didn't want to make another category.
posted by Etrigan at 10:27 AM on August 21, 2013


I take that back. Filipinos in Alaska are indeed A Thing.

According to this, by 2025 Alaska will be 25% Filipino by ethnicity. I'm not going to pretend that didn't blow my mind.
posted by Copronymus at 10:28 AM on August 21, 2013 [4 favorites]


What falls under 'other Indo-European languages'?

The short answer is "Almost everything." I'm thinking it's probably mostly stuff like Kurdish and Macedonian (but not Arabic and Syriac, which are listed specifically at ~1% each), but that's just a guess based on what I can glean from Wikipedia.
posted by Sys Rq at 10:36 AM on August 21, 2013


Yeah, I'm actually really puzzled by Macomb County. I grew up near there, and I'd have expected Arabic, Spanish or Chaldean to come out on top.

I wonder if they've treated "Other Indo-European" as if it were a single language in working out the top language for the county. Like, okay, if you lump together the speakers of Macedonian and Kurdish and all the other Indo-Iranian languages and Albanian and Polish and I dunno maybe Greek and whatever else is spoken there, and treat them as a single category, then it's possible that category will come out ahead of the others. But that seems like a pretty serious misrepresentation if that's what they've done...
posted by Now there are two. There are two _______. at 10:55 AM on August 21, 2013 [1 favorite]


Now there are two_______: I don't think so. Because Wayne County (a.k.a. Dearborn) is marked as Spanish, when it is famously largely a Muslim/Middle Eastern enclave. My guess on Macomb County is that it's referring to Polish and variations of the same. Could be very wrong, though.

Oh, and I remember an old Family Guy where we kept going back to comments from two Portuguese guys working on Peter's fishing boat. I thought it was just randomness, but now I know that Portuguese fishermen in Massachusetts/Rhode Island is totally a thing.
posted by Navelgazer at 11:09 AM on August 21, 2013


According to this, by 2025 Alaska will be 25% Filipino by ethnicity. I'm not going to pretend that didn't blow my mind."

That's not really that many people though. All of Alaska only has 750,000 population, just barely larger than the city of Boston.
posted by octothorpe at 11:09 AM on August 21, 2013


Because Wayne County (a.k.a. Dearborn) is marked as Spanish, when it is famously largely a Muslim/Middle Eastern enclave.

Who speak Arabic, Chaldean, Persian, Kurdish, Armenian, Assyrian, etc., as opposed to Latin American immigrants, who speak almost exclusively Spanish.
posted by Etrigan at 11:15 AM on August 21, 2013


That's not really that many people though. All of Alaska only has 750,000 population, just barely larger than the city of Boston.

I assure you, if you'd asked me to ballpark the US Census's estimate of how many people of Filipino descent would be living in Alaska in 2025, my answer would not have been within 3 orders of magnitude of "a few hundred thousand".
posted by Copronymus at 11:16 AM on August 21, 2013 [5 favorites]


Because Wayne County (a.k.a. Dearborn)

Wait, but Wayne County also includes the city of Detroit proper and a bunch of its other suburbs. Dearborn is a drop in the bucket there, demographically speaking, and outside Dearborn there's a lot of other places in the county with a pretty big Hispanic population. I'm not at all surprised that Spanish comes out on top.

(If you counted just Dearborn, then yeah, Arabic would beat Spanish easily.)

I'm still baffled by Macomb County.
posted by Now there are two. There are two _______. at 11:19 AM on August 21, 2013


I'm still baffled by Macomb County.

It's not that baffling. What you described above -- if you lump together the speakers of Macedonian and Kurdish and all the other Indo-Iranian languages and Albanian and Polish and I dunno maybe Greek and whatever else is spoken there, and treat them as a single category, then it's possible that category will come out ahead of the others -- is what's going on there.
posted by Sys Rq at 11:27 AM on August 21, 2013 [1 favorite]


Sorry, my mistake. I thought Dearborn was the seat of Wayne County for some reason. And Etrigen, yeah, that was my point, that a highly Middle Eastern part of the country would be overlooked on this sort of map because it doesn't have linguistic unity the way Latin American parts would (and in fact in a lot of ways I suspect the Spanish is misleading, as from my experience a lot of Mexicans / Puerto Ricans / Cubans / Columbians, etc. don't really love being constantly lumped in together.)
posted by Navelgazer at 11:51 AM on August 21, 2013


According to this, by 2025 Alaska will be 25% Filipino by ethnicity.

There are 20,000 Filipino people there now, and 700,000 total.

(20000+n)/(700000+n) = 0.25
n=206667

They're expecting at least 200,000 Filipinos to move to Alaska in the next 12 years?

That's nonsense. Maybe 1 in 4 people *moving* to Alaska will be Filipino by 2025.
posted by Pruitt-Igoe at 1:04 PM on August 21, 2013


They're expecting at least 200,000 Filipinos to move to Alaska in the next 12 years?

That's nonsense.


Filipinos are willing to scatter all over the world for work. I would not be at all surprised if they were the second-most populous nationality in Iraq during the war, because they'd work at the mess hall for $1000 a month. It got to the point that the Philippines started stamping "NOT VALID FOR TRAVEL TO IRAQ" on passports. Which worked about as well as you would think.

200K may be a bit overselling it, but 100K? Sure. Like any immigrant community, it only takes a few calling back home saying, "Holy shit, I own my own house, and I can vote, and the cops actually come when I call! They don't even have summer here!"
posted by Etrigan at 1:17 PM on August 21, 2013


Portuguese in New England is a really fascinating story! Early on, there were immigrants from mainland Portugal working in the whaling industry who ended up in Martha's Vinyard and Nantucket

A Portuguese man in Nantucket
regarded the sea with disquiet.
Harpooning the beast
presages a feast,
but stains the pale waters with scarlet.
posted by ersatz at 1:18 PM on August 21, 2013


Considering the Philippines benefits greatly from the Overseas Filipino Worker economy, it's no surprise that where there is a job opportunity for the popular careers trained in the RP (healthcare, service and industrial seem to be the big three) you'll have an influx of OFWs.

It's why they have a special lane at NAIA and that in a decently sized Filipino community you can buy Balikbayan boxes that maximize the luggage allowed on international flights.
posted by linux at 1:33 PM on August 21, 2013


And to follow up on the Filipino diaspora talk, there are about 10 million "overseas Filipinos" right now, which is about 10% of the population of the Philippines. Considering the Irish diaspora sent about four times that proportion of its population overseas a century ago, it's not inconceivable that a few bad years there could ratchet up emigration, especially since U.S.-Philippine relations have been, uh, peculiar-but-friendly over the years.
posted by psoas at 1:54 PM on August 21, 2013 [1 favorite]


What are all those Filipinos doing in Alaska?
Filipinos have a long history in Alaska. They were initially recruited to work the salmon harvest and in the canneries. Many ended up permanently settling in AK and have as much a part in the making of this state as European descended settlers. Intermarriage between Tlingit and Filipino was and still is common. Most Native families also have Filipino heritage. It's not unusual to be served lumpia at a 40 day party (traditional Tlingit funeral social function) along with your halibut. In Juneau you are almost as likely to hear Tagalog in the halls of the State Office Building as English and pancit sits right next to fried chicken in the grocery store deli. Shit, this white girl from rural Iowa just made chicken adobo for lunch, that's how intertwined Filipino culture is with life in Southeast AK.
posted by Foam Pants at 1:58 PM on August 21, 2013 [10 favorites]


There are 20,000 Filipino people there now, and 700,000 total.

(20000+n)/(700000+n) = 0.25
n=206667

They're expecting at least 200,000 Filipinos to move to Alaska in the next 12 years?


1. Immigration is not the only source of Filipinos
2. A majority of Alaskans are mortal

As to that second point, take into account that Alaska's population boom coincided with the oil boom of the 1960s and 70s, and a lot of those people were men who, due to there being an insufficient female population, never married or had children. They're currently dying off.
posted by Sys Rq at 3:07 PM on August 21, 2013 [1 favorite]


(Actually, now that I look at the numbers, Alaska's weirdly male-weighted stats extend through all age groups under 70, and probably have nothing to do with the oil boom. Huh. Still, though, gotta subtract deaths.)
posted by Sys Rq at 3:14 PM on August 21, 2013


But also:
3. Immigration is not the only source of non-Filipinos
4. Non-Filipinos will move to the state too

I thought (perhaps wrongly) that these other factors would cancel each other out, and chose to do a rough calculation.

Maybe 1 in 4 Alaskans really will be of Filipino descent in 12 years (up from 1 in 23 today). But I think that number is either grossly optimistic and was just pulled out of the air, or the person who wrote that article misunderstood the number they were given.
posted by Pruitt-Igoe at 3:35 PM on August 21, 2013


1. Immigration is not the only source of Filipinos

If there were two Filipinos in Alaska right now, I'd believe that they could increase their numbers tenfold in a dozen years thanks to non-immigration means. Not so much if there are 20,000.
posted by Etrigan at 5:07 PM on August 21, 2013


That being said, how is it that other ethno-linguistic groups like Germans, French, Chinese have only minor pockets in which it's still preserved as the at-home language, but Spanish is apparently strongly dominant?

I don't know; it's a big mystery.
posted by kirkaracha at 9:26 PM on August 21, 2013 [1 favorite]


I suspected that the early Filipino immigrants might have been fishermen, thanks, Foam Pants! And, FWIW, this little white girl from Vermont makes chicken adobo too, but that only took one Filipino friend in college because that shit is DELICIOUS.
posted by maryr at 10:13 PM on August 21, 2013


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