Slate has a series of language maps of the US that has me intrigued and puzzled. The first two maps, which show the most common second language by state and the thirdish most common language are easy. But the distribution of Native American languages bugs me. What the hell are all those Navajo speakers doing in Massachusetts? Or the Hopi in New Hampshire? Then there are the others. How did all those Nepali speakers end up in North Dakota?
Anybody have any clues? Maybe a linguistics professor who has studied this stuff?
I don’t have any real information but in the absence of anything else, my gut reaction is that there may not be all that many native speakers of native american languages historically present in the area and enough culturally conscious Navajo and Hopi speakers moved to the Northeast for whatever reason to overwhelm what extant population there was.
That just adds other interesting questions, like why did so many Bosnians head for North Dakota of all places? You’d think they’d want to settle someplace nice.
Navajo is by far the Native American language with the most speakers. Given that there apparently aren’t any reservations in New Hampshire or Massachusetts, the Native American language that’s likely to be the one most spoken in those states is whatever happens to be the most spoken around the U.S., just because a few of them happened to emigrate there. Why Hopi is the most common language in Vermont and Delaware is beyond me though. I also don’t understand why Dakota is the most common in Ohio and Sahaptian is the most common in New Jersey.
Oh a lot NJ native americans were moved to reservations in Oklahoma.
But still the language was the north east language, and some did remain in New England .
SO maybe the language from the west is just one family who moved to New Jersey and makes a statistic aberration… just some noise on the background of 0.
The states with the “out of place” Native American languages are New Hampshire, Delaware (both Hopi), Massachusetts, Connecticut, Hawaii (all Navajo), New Jersey (Sahaptian), and Ohio (Dakota). These are all states with very few if any remaining tribes. There are no federally recognized tribes in New Hampshire, New Jersey, Delaware, Ohio, or (of course) Hawaii, one in Massachusetts, and two in Connecticut (from this site). The language the Massachusetts tribe, Wampanoag, is no longer actively spoken. and the Mohegan and Pequot languages of Connecticut are also extinct. A check of some of the non-recognized tribes in the other states indicates that most of their languages are also extinct or there are no speakers left in the state.
The Navajo (300,000) and Sioux/Dakota (170,000) are among the most numerous tribes and are most likely to have members living in other states. Given the very small numbers of Native Americans in the states above, only a small number from each tribe could easily make them dominant. The Hopi are not all that numerous (18,000), and the largest groups of Sahaptian speakers seem to be the Yakama (10,000) and Nez Perce (3,500). It’s not clear why these latter groups would be concentrated in the states that they are.
[QUOTE=Isildur]
Thats a mistake. The local tribe has remained dominant.
[/QUOTE]
What tribe is that, and how many still speak their language?
Chitimacha in Louisiana is also bizarre, as the language is supposed to be extinct. I suppose they’re counting the people who’re learning the language as part of a revitalization effort? I highly doubt there’s more than a handful of fluent Chitimacha speakers in the world, and there are no native speakers left alive. I have to think there’s more Choctaw speakers in Louisiana than Chitimacha speakers!
Most North American Indian languages are dead (or nearly dead) languages, even though the tribal identity still remains. In some states, all the Native Americans in who have an historical presence in that state might be associated with tribes whose languages are dead or nearly dead, so the only speakers of any native languages might be a few Navajos who have migrated to that state, where otherwise, no other Native language remains in existence…
Isilder, what are you talking about? There are no speakers of any of the languages of the Native American tribes which originally lived in New Jersey anywhere in the U.S. (although there are some speakers of Munsee left in Canada). Most of the descendants of those tribes live in Oklahoma, although some are back in New Jersey. There are attempts to revive some of these languages, but it’s not clear that they will succeed. Interestingly, there are descendants of a tribe from Puerto Rico, the Taino, who live in New Jersey. Again, there is an attempt to revive the language, but it’s not clear if it will succeed:
Incidentally, be careful when you quote people. I wrote:
> I also don’t understand why Dakota is the most common in Ohio and Sahaptian is
> the most common in New Jersey.
You quoted this as:
> Sahaptian is the most common in New Jersey.
You should have quoted this with ellipses, like this:
> . . . Sahaptian is the most common in New Jersey . . .
since it wasn’t a complete sentence and quoting it as a complete sentence misstates my point.
Reading the other blog post linked to in the first sentence of the Slate article the OP linked to, I find a pretty good explanation of the logical & statistical shortcomings of maps like those. Which puts some conceptual skeleton inside the factual meat provided by the posters above.
In fact, the language-by-state maps were explicitly designed to demonstrate the foibles of “best-of-each-state” maps like those.
If you go to the MLA data center and look up the numbers yourself. It’s a fun tool for language nerds like me with data at national, state, county, and local levels. For example, click on the state tab, then Massachusetts then “show more languages” (which is a relatively nondescript link). You will find that there are 56 Navajo speakers in the entire state. But there are 58 Cherokee speakers, and 200 Algonquian speakers. Algonquian is not a single language, but is the language family that most New England tribes spoke before European contact.
