“As you zoom in to even smaller geographic areas, then the dots will represent less people -- be it 10 people or 75 or 50. So, it’s designed to kind of give you an overall visual of the patterns of people who speak a particular language other than English at home.”

Those other languages are Spanish, French, French Creole, Italian, Portuguese, German, Russian, Polish, Persian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Tagalog, Arabic and Vietnamese. More than 60.5 million people in the United States are speaking at home in at least one of those languages.

Two-thirds of the people in the report speak Spanish. Vietnamese saw the greatest increase in the number of speakers between 2005 and 2011. It rose seven times over the period!

The 2011 Language Mapper is based on information collected over the past seven years. But it includes population study material gathered over the last 30 years. During that time, the number of non-English speakers in the United States rose 158 percent.

Camille Ryan says the interactive map can serve many purposes.

“For example, if you are a business and you are looking to tailor your communication to a particular customer, you will know what languages you need to address for that particular community. In addition to that, if you are an emergency responder, you can actually use the mapper to figure out what languages you need to be able to communicate in with people in your particular community.”