Neighborhood

Bedford-Stuyvesant

Brooklyn
In the Census-defined PUMA including Bedford-Stuyvesant, according to recent Census data, (in descending order) Yiddish, French, Haitian Creole, Bengali, and Hebrew each have more than 1000 speakers. English and Spanish varieties are widely spoken in the area as well.
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Languages with a significant site in this neighborhood, marked by a point on the map:

African-American English

Black English
African-American life in Brooklyn dates back to the days when it was an independent city centered on what is today Downtown Brooklyn, but with vast rural and small-town hinterlands devoted to farming. Slavery persisted into the first decades of the 19th century, longer than elsewhere in New York (and in the North more generally). Weeksville, a free Black community, grew up near today's Crown Heights and Bed-Stuy neighborhoods partly in the wake of the devastating Draft Riots of 1863, which drove many Black people from Manhattan. More recently, the movement of a growing African-American community out of overcrowded Harlem after the Second World War led to tremendous growth in Black Brooklyn. By the 1960s and 70s, Bed-Stuy and the surrounding neighborhoods had become a major center of African-American life, culture, and politics, with figures ranging from Shirley Chisholm to Spike Lee to the Notorious B.I.G. all making their mark.

Edo

Ẹ̀dó
New York's Nigerian population started growing in the 1970s and 80s, accelerating since 2000 in part thanks to the Diversity Visa program. Nigerians from a wide variety of backgrounds—though a significant percentage are middle-class and highly educated— now make up a large percentage of the city's massive West African community, particularly in East New York, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Flatbush, Clifton, and Concourse. Numerous evangelical churches now serve Christian Nigerian New Yorkers, and there are a number of restaurants, markets, and other businesses for the wider community. Community and hometown organizations also represent those with ties to particular Nigerian states like Edo and Akwa Ibom. The multilingualism of Nigerian New Yorkers testifies to the country's extraordinary linguistic diversity, though Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, and Edo varieties appear to be the most common, with Nigerian English sometimes a lingua franca. Smaller language groups are also present, including some with substantial and well-organized communities: Afenmai, Anaang, Edo, Efik, Esan, Ibibio, Kalabari, Tiv, Urhobo, and likely others.

Fulani

Pulaar
New York is home to a substantial Fulani-speaking community, based primarily in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Harlem. In West Africa, including Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Senegal etc., the language is called Pulaar and the people call themselves Fulbhe. Further east (Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad etc.), the language is called Fulfulde and people call themselves Fulani. Only in Guinea do Fulani speakers constitute a majority of the national population. "Fulani" should be considered a language group with significant internal diversity, including at least 9 languages spoken in different countries with separate codes in Ethnologue. There are at least three Fuutas, or Fula regions, according to local community leader Ben Jalloh: Fuuta Jalong, Fuuta Toro, Futa Masina. Some dialect differences may come from French, Wolof, or Hausa influence. A significant number of speakers in New York come from Guinea, Senegal, and Mauritania in particular, with many members of the Brooklyn community from the Fuuta Koobe around the Senegal river in present-day Mauritania and Senegal.

Gullah

Geechees
Gullah, a creole language with roots in English and various West and Central African languages, is spoken by Gullah-Geechee people predominately along the Southeast coast of the US, specifically the Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina. Many probably began arriving in New York with the Great Migration of African-Americans from those states in the first half of the 20th century, which also saw increasing displacement from the Sea Islands. In the late 1970s, CUNY linguist William A. Stewart documented the language with the help of New York's Gullah-speaking community, estimated to be 1,000 strong at the time. Prof. Stewart found Gullah-Geechee people hesitant to call their native tongue a proper language, and one goal of his work was to counter this sense of shame, common to speakers of oral languages, by validating Gullah's status as a language. A significant community of Gullah speakers lived within the African-American community in Bed-Stuy at the time, with others in Harlem.

Hassaniya Arabic

حسانية
A broad representation of the world's Arabic varieties, as used by Muslims, Christians, and Jews from West Africa to Iraq, can be found across the metropolitan area — although many of them are mutually unintelligible with each other, speakers are able to communicate in the Modern Standard Arabic known as al-fuṣḥā ("the purest", and there is often widespread familiarity with larger varieties like Egyptian Arabic. In the second half of the 20th century, what had been primarily a Levantine Arabic speaking community (by then mostly in Brooklyn) was joined by significant numbers of Egyptian Arabic and Yemeni Arabic speakers, as well as smaller numbers of many other varieties found throughout the city. Significant Arabic-speaking areas include Bay Ridge, Astoria, the Bronx (for West African Arabic speakers), Yonkers, and Paterson, New Jersey. Classical (or Qu'ranic) Arabic flourishes widely at mosques like the Islamic Cultural Center on the Upper East Side and the Jamaica Muslim Center in Queens as well schools like Al-Noor in Brooklyn. Jewish varieties of Arabic, often linked to the local variety of the particular country of origin, are still spoken to some degree among the sizeable Middle Eastern and North African Jewish communities in the city, especially in Brooklyn.

Mossi

Mòoré
For the growing community of several thousand Burkinabé New Yorkers (from Burkina Faso), Mossi is a national language and lingua franca in addition to French. Burkinabés are now settling throughout the city and surrounding area, establishing a range of institutions and community hubs from the well-known music venue The Shrine in Harlem to the Burkina Business Center in the Bronx, and restaurants like Zaca Cafe in Bed-Stuy and Burkindi in Newark.

Ndebele

IsiNdebele
Several thousand South African New Yorkers live in neighborhoods across the city — besides South African English, there are at least small numbers of speakers of Afrikaans, Xhosa, Zulu, Northern Sotho (also spoken in Lesotho), Ndebele (also spoken in Zimbabwe), Swati (also spoken in Eswatini), and Tswana (also spoken in Botswana). All are official languages of South Africa today, testifying to an extraordinary multilingualism also embodied by comedian and New York resident Trevor Noah, who reportedly speaks (a distinctly South African-inflected) English, Afrikaans, Southern Sotho, Tsonga, Tswana, Xhosa, and Zulu.

Swahili

Kiswahili
Swahili speakers in New York typically hail from Kenya or Tanzania, though the language is also a lingua franca more widely across East Africa, so there are also speakers from Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Comoros, and other nations. Swahili is also one of the most commonly learned African languages by non-Africans. While more Swahili speakers may live in other U.S. cities such as Chicago and Washington D.C., the language in New York has a cosmopolitan user base, including in Harlem, Brooklyn, New Jersey, and elsewhere. A number of Kenyans live in various Central New Jersey towns, as well as Paterson and Jersey City, where there are 1,513 Swahili speakers according to 2015-2019 American Community Survey data.

Wolof

Wolof
While French is the official language of Senegal, Wolof is the most widely spoken language and serves as a lingua franca across various ethnolinguistic communities in the country. Significant waves of Senegalese immigration to the U.S. began in the 1970s, extending well-organized diaspora networks both in the region and in Europe (especially those associated with the Murid Sufi brotherhood based in Touba). Young Senegalese merchants, usually young men, made a living as street vendors selling a wide variety of products across Manhattan and in turn shipping American products back to Africa. Initially living in old Manhattan hotels set up for single bachelors, many Senegalese New Yorkers converged on Central Harlem, with West 116th between Malcom X and Frederick Douglass becoming Le Petit Senegal. Wolof speakers, of whom today there are thousands in the city, have also moved further north in Harlem, and to parts of Brooklyn, and especially to the Bronx. Increasingly diverse within itself, the Senegalese migration also paved the way for other traders and immigrants from Francophone West Africa.
Additional languages spoken in this neighborhood:
  • Garifuna
  • Hasidic Yiddish
  • Igbo
  • Nigerian English
  • Yoruba
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Bedford-Stuyvesant

Brooklyn

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