Confederacy of a Dunce - Language maps 2: English spoke here.

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

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In my previous entry, I started playing around with the MLA Language Map. Today I decided to do some more investigations, this time starting with the English map, which shows the percentage of people in each county who speak English as their first language:

First, I thought I'd try and find the county in which the greatest percentage of respondents are English speakers. Guessing from the legend on the map above, it looks like I should be able to find one county with 99.58% English speakers. Looking at the map, though, gives an idea about how hard this may be: vast stretches of the midwest and southeast are marked with the darkest color, including almost all of Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee. It was trivially easy to find counties at 98% or higher (just wander around Mississippi and Alabama) but was extremely hard to cross the 99 barrier.

Where do you find the elusive 99? How about "up in the hills"? The Ozarks was where I found my first, and so far only, 99: Searcy County, Arkansas (99.06%, with only 64 Spanish speakers and 8 Italians). The Wikipedia entry is especially dry (even for a "county" entry) so I offer you some information about the controversy concerning the 1998 election for sheriff (pos-c.com link).

Encouraged by this success, I checked various other Ozark counties without finding any other 99s. Next stop, Appalachia. And surprise, West Virgina brought in the second 99+ (Pleasants County, 99.10%, only 63 Spanish speakers). Here's a small site with some local information (and the dry-as-a-bone Wikipedia entry). It also has a bridge. But Pleasants County is as high as I managed to get. Can anyone do better? You can do searches here.

Next entry: counties where very few people speak English. Of course you would expect to find most of these in the Southwest where Spanish is spoken by a significant population, but there are three counties in the US where a language besides Spanish or English is the most commonly spoken. I have found two of them at the moment, but the third is proving elusive so far.

language

Tuesday, April 25, 2006 1:05:38 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)