বাংলা
Bengali
East VillageToday, there are more speakers of Bengali in NYC than there are of any other South Asian language. Beginning in the 1980s, Bangladeshis won slots in the visa lottery and started bringing their families and establishing growing communities throughout the five boroughs, while working largely in construction, in food service, and as cab drivers. While some Bengali-speaking New Yorkers are from the Indian state of West Bengal, the majority are Bangladeshi and may speak the distinctive Sylheti, Chittagonian, Noakhilla, Rangpuri, or Sandwippa varieties—and in a small number of cases, minority languages of Bangladesh from the north (e.g. Garo) or the Chittagong Hill Tracts (e.g. Chakma), or closer to the Indian border (e.g. Santali).
B
etween 1917 and 1965, legislation severely limited South Asians from immigrating to the US, but speakers of Bengali and (the closely related) Sylheti nonetheless found their way to New York, often by working on British steamships that stopped at various East Coast ports. Living among and assimilating into African-American and Puerto Rican communities, a notable Bengali-speaking community grew up in East Harlem, as chronicled in Vivek Bald's book Bengali Harlem. Another cluster, as Bald describes, found their way to the Lower East Side, where a substantially Sylheti-speaking community has now existed for over half a century, with Bengali known as a second language.
Note that the language above may be used throughout the New York area — this is just one significant site.