Русский
Russian
Rego Park +2Many 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.
M
emorably described by the novelist Sergei Dovaltov, Jewish refuseniks who left the Soviet Union as political dissidents in the 1970s were among the first Russian speakers to settle in and around Rego Park. From this nucleus has grown a much larger and more diverse Russian-speaking zone in eastern Queens, encompassing parts of Forest Hills and Kew Gardens and including non-Jewish Russians, Bukharian Jews, and Central Asian Muslims.
Note that the language above may be used throughout the New York area — this is just one significant site.