As our society becomes more diverse, there are many households where English is not the primary language spoken at home. For advertisers, marketers, and even with site selection, looking at these data variables can prove to be crucial to your plans. Using current year estimates, we took a look at bilingual households across the US.

Since most people are well aware of the Hispanic influence across the southern states, we thought it would be interesting to add a twist — for the map below, we looked at households that are bilingual in a language that is not Spanish, so this covers households who are bilingual and speak something other than Spanish in addition to English. The map is a hot spot of households built using the grid layer tool in Snapshot.

Several interesting patterns emerged when we looked at the map. The immediate group that jumps off the map are the Native American reservations in the area known as “Four Corners”, just above Albuquerque, New Mexico. There are concentrations of German speaking households in southeastern Pennsylvania, and the Millersburg, Ohio area. French speakers can be found in west Louisiana, and in northern Maine. In Detroit, the households that speak another language mostly speak Arabic and other middle eastern languages. There is also a large concentration of non-English speakers in the South Bend, Indiana area, but we honestly don’t know what language they speak in those areas. If you do, be sure to let us know!

We hope that this has served as another reminder why you need a broad range of data to make the best decisions. Advertisements in German might not be read in New Orleans, but you can be sure that one in French will be looked at by residents there.