Tim Kaine speaking Spanish

Since he was chosen for VP on the Democratic ticket today, and one of his qualities is being able to speak Spanish, the next question is going to be how well he speaks it. The answer: quite well. In this video he starts at 50 seconds.



And 1 minute in in this video.



Sometimes with someone who "speaks Spanish" you get that really heavy English accent accompanying it (think Bloomberg, very painful to listen to) but Kaine is a pleasure to listen to.

Personally my favourite candidate in this season's election is Bill Weld, but Kaine is up there as well.

Somebody commented that Kaine is probably going to forget how to speak English after this campaign since they'll be leveraging his Spanish as much as possible up to November, and it's probably true that we're going to hear a *lot* of him in Spanish over the next few months.

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50 minutes of Spanish with Portuguese subtitles

And by coincidence I found this on Christmas morning: a 50 minute interview in Spanish with Pope Francis that just happens to have Portuguese subtitles throughout as well. The subtitles really show that 1) the two languages are close enough that you could almost use one to write the other, but 2) you would still have to outright change about every tenth word.

Watching Spanish with Portuguese subtitles or the other way around (Catalan too) always feels like an alternate world where a less phonetic writing standard has been in use, something more akin to those used for English or French.

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What percentage of scientific publications are in Spanish?

Instead of just revealing the number in the title, imagine what you think it is and then follow the link here to find the number. By the way, it's in fifth place and German is second after English. The article doesn't say which languages are in between but I will guess French, and...Japanese.


For posterity's sake (if the link dies in a year, for example) I'll include a paragraph from the article, and just white it out.

El volumen muestra datos contundentes. En la base de datos SCI, que indexa 8.300 revistas especializadas de 150 disciplinas científicas, el 97% de sus más de siete millones de artículos publicados entre 2005 y 2010 está en inglés. El alemán es el segundo idioma, con un porcentaje inferior al 1%. Y el español aparece como quinta lengua, con un ínfimo 0,24% de las publicaciones.

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How to think in Spanish

I love these textbooks on Archive.org. One of them comes complete with movements to carry out while learning phrases.

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US census language map

Regarding a previous post on the distribution of languages spoken at home in the US (where Italian showed a marked decline), here is an interactive map showing which counties have more than 10% of the population using a language other than English. Most of these are Spanish, but we do see some other languages such as French in Louisiana, Portuguese in Massachusetts, and even Russian in Alaska. Navajo is also quite prevalent.

For the percent change in Latino population over ten years (2000 to 2010), Wikipedia has the following image. This of course does not necessarily reflect usage of the language itself (Latinos who do not speak Spanish are common), and dividing it up by county makes for quite the messy map. I prefer this table showing the percentage increase by state in the far right column.

Hispanic and Latino Population by state or territory (2000–2010)^[10][11]

State/Territory	Pop 2000	% pop 2000	Pop 2010	% pop 2010	% growth 2000-2010
South Carolina	95,076	2.4%	235,682	5.1%	+147.9%
Alabama	75,830	1.7%	185,602	3.9%	+144.8%
Tennessee	123,838	2.2%	290,059	4.6%	+134.2%
Kentucky	59,939	1.5%	132,836	3.1%	+121.6%
Arkansas	86,866	3.2%	186,050	6.4%	+114.2%
North Carolina	378,963	4.7%	800,120	8.4%	+111.1%
Maryland	227,916	4.3%	470,632	8.2%	+106.5%
Mississippi	39,569	1.4%	81,481	2.7%	+105.9%
South Dakota	10,903	1.4%	22,119	2.7%	+102.9%
Delaware	37,277	4.8%	73,221	8.2%	+96.4%
Georgia	435,227	5.3%	853,689	8.8%	+96.1%
Virginia	329,540	4.7%	631,825	7.9%	+91.7%
Oklahoma	179,304	5.2%	332,007	8.9%	+85.2%
Iowa	82,473	2.8%	151,544	5.0%	+83.7%
Pennsylvania	394,088	3.2%	719,660	5.7%	+82.6%
Nevada	393,970	19.7%	716,501	26.5%	+81.9%
Indiana	214,536	3.5%	389,707	6.0%	+81.7%
West Virginia	12,279	0.7%	22,268	1.2%	+81.4%
Maine	9,360	0.7%	16,935	1.3%	+80.9%
Missouri	118,592	2.1%	212,470	3.5%	+79.2%
New Hampshire	20,489	1.7%	36,704	2.8%	+79.1%
Louisiana	107,738	2.4%	192,560	4.2%	+78.7%
Utah	201,559	9.0%	358,340	13.0%	+77.8%
Nebraska	94,425	5.5%	167,405	9.2%	+77.3%
Minnesota	143,382	2.9%	250,258	4.7%	+74.5%
Wisconsin	192,921	3.6%	336,056	5.9%	+74.2%
Idaho	101,690	7.9%	175,901	11.2%	+73.0%
North Dakota	7,786	1.2%	13,467	2.0%	+73.0%
Washington	441,509	7.5%	755,790	11.2%	+71.2%
Vermont	5,504	0.9%	9,208	1.5%	+67.3%
Oregon	275,314	8.0%	450,062	11.7%	+63.5%
Ohio	217,123	1.9%	354,674	3.1%	+63.4%
Kansas	188,252	7.0%	300,042	10.5%	+59.4%
Wyoming	31,669	6.4%	50,231	8.9%	+58.6%
Montana	18,081	2.0%	28,565	2.9%	+58.0%
Florida	2,682,715	16.8%	4,223,806	22.5%	+57.4%
Alaska	25,852	4.1%	39,250	5.5%	+51.8%
Connecticut	320,323	9.4%	479,087	13.4%	+49.6%
Massachusetts	428,729	6.8%	627,654	9.6%	+46.4%
Arizona	1,295,617	25.3%	1,895,149	29.6%	+46.3%
Rhode Island	90,820	8.7%	130,655	12.4%	+43.9%
Texas	6,669,666	32.0%	9,460,921	37.6%	+41.8%
Colorado	735,801	17.1%	1,038,687	20.7%	+41.2%
New Jersey	1,117,191	13.3%	1,555,144	17.7%	+39.2%
Hawaii	87,699	7.2%	120,842	8.9%	+37.8%
Michigan	323,877	3.3%	436,358	4.4%	+34.7%
Illinois	1,530,262	12.3%	2,027,578	15.8%	+32.5%
California	10,966,556	32.4%	14,013,719	37.6%	+27.8%
New Mexico	765,386	42.1%	953,403	46.3%	+24.6%
District of Columbia	44,953	7.9%	54,749	9.1%	+21.8%
New York	2,867,583	15.1%	3,416,922	17.6%	+19.2%
Puerto Rico	3,762,746	98.8%	3,688,455	99.0%	+0.2%
American Samoa
Guam
Northern Mariana Islands
U.S. Virgin Islands	15,196	14.0%
United States of America	35,305,818	12.5%	50,477,594	16.3%	+43.0%

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