Language

Black English

African-American English
  • Global speakers: 45,109,521
  • ISO 639-3: eng
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Census
African-American English is spoken in neighborhoods across the city and metro region and has been been a major influence, especially through music and popular culture, on other forms of English and other languages used in the city. Though forms have been spoken for centuries, it was the Great Migration of the 1920s and 1930s that brought large numbers of African-Americans from Southeastern states in particular (Georgia, the Carolinas) and played a decisive role in shaping the variety spoken today in New York.
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Sites

NYC neighborhoods or towns in the metro region where the language community has a significant site, marked by a point on the map:

Brooklyn

Bedford-Stuyvesant
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Manhattan

Central Harlem
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Staten Island

Clifton
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Bronx

Edenwald
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Nassau

Hempstead (NY)
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Queens

Hollis
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Essex

Newark (NJ)
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Additional neighborhoods (NYC only)

  • Far Rockaway
  • Jamaica
  • St. Albans
  • Morningside Heights
  • Baychester
  • Wakefield
  • Ocean Hill-Brownsville
  • East New York
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An urban language map

Welcome to Languages of New York City, a free and interactive digital map of the world’s most linguistically diverse metropolitan area.

All data, unless otherwise specified, is from the Endangered Language Alliance (ELA), based on information from communities, speakers, and other sources.

The map is a work in progress and a partial snapshot, focused on significant sites for Indigenous, minority, and endangered languages. Larger languages are represented selectively. To protect the privacy of speakers, some locations are slightly altered. Social media users, note that LANGUAGEMAP.NYC works best in a separate browser. We apologize that the map may not be fully accessible to all users, including the visually impaired.

This map was created by the Mapping Linguistic Diversity team, with core support from the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies and the Endangered Language Alliance. Please send feedback!

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