Tontemboan
ElmhurstCommunity Profile: New York's relatively new Indonesian community is several thousand strong and growing, with the largest concentration in Elmhurst, and the Al-Hikmah mosque in Astoria serving as an important community center for Indonesian Muslims (while churches serve an analogous role for Christians). Indonesian serves as a lingua franca to which all Indonesians are increasingly shifting, but the New York community is highly multilingual with numerous speakers of Javanese, Manado Malay, Sundanese, and a dozen other languages.
T
ontemboan is an Austronesian language, of northern Sulawesi, Indonesia, with approximately 100,000 speakers, although it is not being passed on to children and is under pressure from Manado Malay, a Malay creole prevalent in the region. Documentation of Tontemboan assembled by missionaries a century ago is relatively inaccessible to its speakers, as it is written in Dutch. A small number of Tontemboan speakers — such as Alfrits and his wife Rose — have settled in Queens.
Note that the language above may be used throughout the New York area — this is just one significant site.