Русский
Russian
Brighton Beach +4Many early Russian speakers were minorities from the western Russian Empire who may have known Russian as a second language but were native speakers of Yiddish, Polish, Ukrainian, Rusyn, Tatar, or other languages. Some were ethnic Russians, and an elite group of White Russians arrived after 1917. Beginning in the 1970s, a new generation of Russians, many of them Russian Jewish dissidents, came to southern Brooklyn and eastern Queens. Today, Russian is a major lingua franca spoken across much of the metro region by communities from across the former Soviet Union.
A
Cold War-era trickle of refugees and dissenters became a flood in the 1970s and '80s as Russian-speaking Soviet Jews were permitted to emigrate and ultimately granted refugee status, settling in large numbers above all in and around an exisitng Jewish community in Brighton Beach. Post-Soviet political and economic turmoil soon pushed a large number of non-Jewish Russians and later other Russian speakers from the former Soviet Union to settle across southern Brooklyn, ultimately constituting one of the largest and most diverse Russian-speaking communities outside the former Soviet Union.
Note that the language above may be used throughout the New York area — this is just one significant site.