Slate maps out most common languages spoken in Arizona, US
May 13, 2014, 7:21 PM | Updated: 7:22 pm
If you come across someone in Arizona who doesn’t speak either English or Spanish, chances are they’re going to speak Navajo, according to recent census data.
The news media company Slate used the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey to analyze the most common languages in each state, generating the data into a handful of maps.
One map shows the most commonly spoken language in each state other than English, and Spanish dominated this category, including in Arizona.
Since Spanish was the answer for almost every state, Slate filtered out English and Spanish the see the next most popular language in each state. Navajo came up as the third-most popular language in Arizona. New Mexico was the only other state to boast Navajo on this particular map.
Another graphic showed the most commonly spoken Native American language by state, and Arizona’s answer was, of course, Navajo — which was dominant in all of the other southwestern states, as well.
According to the census, there are more speakers of Navajo in Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona than there are speakers of other Native American languages in all other states combined.
Slate even looked at the most commonly spoken Scandinavian, Indo-Aryan and African languages spoken by state, and Arizona’s answer for those were — respectively — Danish, Hindi and a three-way tie between Kru, Ibo and Yoruba.
