Iloko
Ilocano
WoodsideCommunity Profile: Some of the earliest Filipino communities in the city formed around port areas and military installations, such as the Brooklyn Navy Yard and later Governors Island. Today, a section of Roosevelt Avenue in Woodside is the major center for Tagalog speakers, and speakers of other languages of the Philippines, both for New York City and for the entire U.S. east of the Mississippi. There are other concentrations in every borough — often formed near hospitals where Filipina women have been employed in healthcare work — and individual speakers throughout the city. Among the largest of the other communities are Cebuano and Ilocano speakers, and a distinctive Philippine English is also spoken by many (with some using the term "Taglish" to describe Tagalog-English mixing). According to 2013-2017 American Community Survey data, 10,051 Tagalog speakers also live in Jersey City, a major community. Despite the great number of Filipinos in the greater NY area, there is little support outside of occasional ad-hoc programs for those who want to pass on their native language to their children or for Filipino-American children to learn their heritage languages elsewhere. The Filipino School of New York and New Jersey has recently arisen to fill this need with classes in the Tagalog-based national language of the Philippines.
T
he Ilocano diaspora in the US is concentrated in Hawai'i, where they originally worked in the pineapple plantations alongside Japanese, Native Hawai'ians and others. Ilocanos have been particularly active in literary production and are one of the few lowland Christian groups in the Philippines to have preserved a precolonial epic (Biag ni Lam-ang, The life of Lam-ang). The Ilocano writers association, GUMIL, has active branches both in the Philippines and in Hawai'i. Here in NYC, the Ilocanos form a part of the larger Filipino community in Queens, which is home to the Ilocano-American Association, Inc. in New York (IAAINY), founded in 1982. The current president of the IAAINY has proudly passed on the language to her children in NYC.
Note that the language above may be used throughout the New York area — this is just one significant site.