Steve Orr

@SOrr1

A newly created interactive map, simple on its face, reveals the extent of the Rochester area's multilingual nature: In both city and suburban neighborhoods, there are pockets of people — hundreds of people in many cases — speaking every language under the sun.

The online resource entitled Languages of Rochester, created by Randy Smith — a digital mapmaker who grew up in the Rochester area — shows the primary language spoken at home in each of Monroe County’s 191 census tracts.

When users drill down, they'll find concentrations of people speaking everything from Hindi to French Creole to Hebrew. English dominates and Spanish is widely spoken, but underneath those layers, we're a polyglot town.

►Map: Languages of Rochester

The Rochester area has been shaped from its founding by immigrant waves both large and small, and they continue to this day. More than 61,000 people living in Monroe County were born in another land, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates released earlier this year.

They came from more than 125 nations and they speak dozens of different languages.

Smith's online map captures this diversity by examining the language that county residents speak in their home.

English, as you’d expect, is the primary language used at home in all but one of the county's census tracts. The exception is a neighborhood just north of downtown Rochester, where Spanish is the most commonly spoken language.

Smith allows users to adjust the map to show the primary language in each census tract other than English. That version shows how widely spoken Spanish is in Rochester-area homes.

Viewers can then “turn off” both English and Spanish and view the next most commonly spoken language in each tract.

That’s when pockets of people emerge who speak a wide variety of other tongues — Hindi, Persian, French Creole, Serbo-Croatian, Laotian, Arabic, African languages, Korean and on and on.

In most cases, it's more than one or two families in each tract that speak something other than English or Spanish at home. Smith said these pockets contain an average of 200 people. One census tract has 700 people who speak Chinese at home, he said.

Such pockets can be found in city and suburbs alike.

To have people who speak a common language congregate in a particular part of town is a natural occurrence, said Jim Morris, who was resettlement director at Catholic Family Center

"This is nothing new, particularly to Rochester. That’s the history of this city. There’s a certain level of comfort in being surrounded by people who share the same culture, who have the same background, who share the same stories," said Morris, who now is associate vice president for family services at the Rochester nonprofit.

► Where Monroe County foreign-born residents come from

"Because we work with a lot of refugees, we’re dealing with first-generation immigrants. Most of the clients we work with don’t speak English. We actively try to put refugees in neighborhoods where they have community support — emotional support, social support, practical support," Morris said. "That’s extremely important."

The data that Smith mapped come from a standard question that the Census Bureau has asked for years. It captures not just recent arrivals in this country but also their children, grandchildren and anyone else who speaks their native tongue with friends or family members.

Smith, who works as a professional geographic information systems (GIS) specialist at a college in Maryland, said he made the map “for fun.

“There is so much data out there that hasn’t been visualized, that sometimes I just like to see what we have and if there is something interesting hidden in it,” he said recently.

He did indeed tap into something interesting with this map. It invites people to explore and muse about how and why groups of people with the same cultural and linguistic background, from the four corners of the Earth, wound up in the same Monroe County neighborhoods.

The census bureau does not track use of American Sign Language, so it is not included in Smith's map. But the Rochester area has a higher proportion of deaf and hard-of-hearing residents than any other community in the nation, and data do show that the census tracts with the greatest concentration of people with hearing difficulties are near the National Technical Institute of the Deaf, part of Rochester Institute of Technology. It's reasonable to assume that ASL is a commonly used language in those tracts.

SORR@Gannett.com