[Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on August 13, 2014 on Pat Smith’s City Researcher blog. Smith is a board member of City Collaborative and one of the organizer’s of ReSurfaced on Main Street. He enjoys analyzing and mapping data to uncover stories about Louisville.]
I’ve been enjoying the various “Most Common Language Other Than English” maps for U.S. states or city neighborhoods that folks have posted this summer, and I didn’t want Louisville to be left out of the fun.
Louisville has developed a reputation as an immigrant-friendly, mid-sized city, so I thought it would be interesting to see how that played out geographically, in terms of language spoken at home. Overall it’s estimated that around 8 percent of Louisvillians speak a language other than English at home (3.8 percent speaking Spanish at home).
Rather than go through a process of aerial interpolation to “force” the data into Louisville’s urban neighborhoods, and creating a more complicated estimate, I’m simply presenting the data as is, estimated at the Census Tract level. So basically I’m using Census Tracts as a rough proxy for neighborhoods.
I am completing data about what languages Kentucky Refugee Ministries’ clients speak – broken down by number of households in certain zip codes. In 2014, 187 households in roughly 6 of the same zip codes spoke 24 languages. Very interesting when you break it all down!
Interesting. There are more languages than I thought in this shithole town.
Hi! I’m a recent high school grad, and I love learning new languages. This map will help me see what areas of town I can go to to try some out! Thanks!
Also, looking at the map, I wonder how many people may be lying on the census? I’ve lived in south Louisville all of my life, and I’ve never met a family that has spoken a language in their home such as German, or French. Maybe these people learned these languages in school and put them on the census as a joke?