By Staff
NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY
Tagalog is the most popular spoken foreign language in Washington after Spanish.
A new study from 24/7 Wall St. determined the most commonly spoken language in each state, using data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2015 American Consumer Survey. The survey excluded Spanish, which is the most commonly spoken language after English in nearly every state.
Almost 1 percent of the state’s population, 62,201 people, speaks Tagalog — the language native to the Philippines — at home.
Close to 1.8 million U.S. residents speak Tagalog at home, making it one of the most commonly spoken foreign languages in the country.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, close to 40 million U.S. residents speak Spanish at home, followed by 2.1 million Chinese speakers. Tagalog, Vietnamese, French, Arabic, and Korean are each spoken by over a million people nationwide.
Looking at the state level, German is the most commonly spoken language among the 50 states after English and Spanish. Vietnamese clocks in as the second most common top foreign language in states, with the population in a total of seven states speaking it most frequently. Chinese follows closely behind with the population of six states speaking it the most — after English and Spanish.