Where in the country people who speak a foreign language live?

In the US there are just over 313 million people over the age of 5, of whom 244 million speak English as their first language. 
That leaves 22% of the population or nearly 70 million people who speak a foreign language as their first language. 
And of the 70 million most of them (43 million) speak Spanish. 

The distribution at the state level of the population that speaks a foreign language is very uneven. 
At the low end, over a third of states have less than 10% of their population that speak a foreign language. 
This includes West Virginia with only 3% of its population or Montana and Mississippi at 4%.
And at the other end of the spectrum are California at 44%, Texas at 35% and New Jersey at 33% all of these states
have a third or more of their population speaking a foreign language.

As this chart shows, 37% of the states have low foreign language speakers and another third have between 10 and 20% of the population
who speaks a foreign language.  The remaining third is mostly in the 20-30%.  And only 1 eighth of the states have more than 30%
of their population who speak a foreign language as their first language.

Here are some interesting tidbits about language hot spots.

It probably won’t surprise you that California ranks very high in folks who speak Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Tagalog (Filipino) as well as Arabic. 

But you might not be able to guess where the highest percentage of Tagalog (Filipino) is spoken ---- Hawai’i at 4% followed closely by Nevada and Alaska both  at 3%.

And the highest percentage of Amharic or Somali is spoken in ---  Minnesota at 2% of their entire population.

Last one – think of 9 states where at least 1% of the population speaks Vietnamese – here’s a hint – New York isn’t one of them….

It’s California, Georgia, Hawaii, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Oregon, Texas, Virginia and Washington state.  How did you do?  Did you get more than 3 right?