Spanish Now Officially Part of US Mainstream Because Slate Said So

Yesterday our news feeds were burning up with a piece published by Slate about the many languages spoken in U.S. households. The article, written by Ben Blatt, went viral because it visually confirmed that yes, the U.S. is really a multilingual society.

However, it is Blatt’s first map that really floored us, and even though Blatt thought the first map was “not too interesting,” we think is was incredibly powerful and interesting. In fact, we thought Blatt’s decision to not even comment that much about that first map led us to add our own annotations (in red) to it:

The rest of Blatt’s piece focused on other languages, which is great, but we find it quite telling that Blatt decided to overlook what we think is quite clear: Español is here to stay in the USofA, so much so that the official Twitter account for Slate
had to tweet this to get people’s attention:

ICYMI: Here’s the most popular non-English, non-Spanish language in your state: http://t.co/jkPQIvPJLz pic.twitter.com/h4MUjVsuEY

— Slate (@Slate) May 13, 2014

So while Blatt and Slate moved pass data that “wasn’t too interesting,” this could indicate that Spanish is officially mainstream. Although you would think Blatt could have at least said a little more about it. It’s not like there isn’t a 2013 Pew study about it.

By the way, if you need a quick Spanish lesson, watch this.