Neighborhood

Brighton Beach

Brooklyn
In the Census-defined PUMA including Brighton Beach & Coney Island, according to recent Census data, (in descending order), Russian (with nearly 38,000), Cantonese, Urdu, and Ukrainian each have more than 1000 speakers. Varieties of English and Spanish are commonly 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:

Avar

Авар
In recent years, small numbers of individuals and families from the highly multilingual Caucasus have come to New York, settling primarily in and around the post-Soviet world of Brighton Beach, though not much information is known. Besides speakers of the major national languages, there are reported to be some Lezgis (some apparently connected with the city's Azeri community), Avars, Chechens, and Ingush. At least for short periods there have also been speakers of Haput and Lak in the city. An older North Caucasian community, where Circassians are most numerous, exists in Paterson, New Jersey.

Bontoc

Bontoc
In 1905, a group of 50 Bontoc speakers from northern Luzon in the Philippines, billed as "the most primitive people in the world", were brought to the U.S. and put on long-term show at Coney Island’s Luna Park, at a site long since demolished. Exhaustively and entertainingly chronicled in "The Lost Tribe of Coney Island", the visit of the Bontoc may be seen as a historical curiosity and a reflection of American imperialism in the Philippines — it did not result in any permanent community taking root. The Bontoc leader at Coney Island, Chief Fomoaley Ponci, said this to a journalist before the community left: "I have seen many wonders, but we will not bring any of them home to Bontoc. We have the great sun and moon to light us; what do we want of you little [electric] suns?"

Buryat

Буряад Xэлэн
Most of the estimated 400 Buryat people living across the New York area have arrived from Buryatia since the fall of the Soviet Union. Community celebrations, including the Sagaalgan (or Buryat New Year) have typically taken place in Russian-speaking venues like The National in Brooklyn. Some may associate with the wider Mongolian community and participate in those celebrations.

Chechen

Нохчийн
In recent years, small numbers of individuals and families from the highly multilingual Caucasus have come to New York, settling primarily in and around the post-Soviet world of Brighton Beach, though not much information is known. Besides speakers of the major national languages, there are reported to be some Lezgis (some apparently connected with the city's Azeri community), Avars, Chechens, and Ingush. At least for short periods there have also been speakers of Haput and Lak in the city. An older North Caucasian community, where Circassians are most numerous, exists in Paterson, New Jersey.

Chuvash

Чӑвашла
One young Chuvash professional, living in Harlem, reported knowing of approximately 20 Chuvash people in the city, though he estimated that only a few speak the language. Most would likely be in Brighton Beach.

Ingush

Г|алг|ай
In recent years, small numbers of individuals and families from the highly multilingual Caucasus have come to New York, settling primarily in and around the post-Soviet world of Brighton Beach, though not much information is known. Besides speakers of the major national languages, there are reported to be some Lezgis (some apparently connected with the city's Azeri community), Avars, Chechens, and Ingush. At least for short periods there have also been speakers of Haput and Lak in the city. An older North Caucasian community, where Circassians are most numerous, exists in Paterson, New Jersey.

Jewish Russian

Еврейский этнолект
Described by Anna Verschik as "a cluster of post-Yiddish varieties of Russian used as a special in-group register by Ashkenazic Jews in Russia", Jewish Russian is sometimes equated with or compared to the particular Yiddish-influenced variety of Russian long spoken in Odessa in today's Ukraine. Though Jewish Russian has been little studied outside Russia, for the past half-century Brooklyn's "Little Odessa" (Brighton Beach and the surrounding neighborhoods) has represented a major concentration of Russian-speaking Jews and appears to be a site for use of the ethnolect.

Karachay-Balkar

Къарачай-Малкъар
Karachay-Balkar, a Turkic language spoken by the Karachay and Balkar peoples of the north Caucasus (today within the Russia), is also spoken by an established and significant community numbering in the thousands in and around Passaic County, New Jersey. Many Karachay left their homeland several generations ago for Turkey before coming to the United States after the Second World War, and knowledge of Turkish (also useful in this part of New Jersey) remains common in the community. Since 1989, the American Karachai-Kavkaz Benevolent Association in Paterson has functioned as an important community institution transmitting cultural heritage. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, some Balkars from within Russia have immigrated to New York and the surrounding area, with at least one living in Brighton Beach as of 2010 and another having started a food stand at the Queens Night Market as of 2019.

Koryo-Mar

고려말
An estimated 1,000 Koryo-saram, mostly from Uzbekistan, live across the city, primarily in Russian-speaking neighborhoods of Brooklyn such as Bensonhurst and Brighton Beach, where there are two Koryo-saram restaurants and at least one church (All Nations Baptist in Park Slope) geared towards Koryo-saram. Few in the community still speak the distinct Koryo-Mar variety of Korean, which showed some phonological differences from the South Korean standard language [표준어], a fact possibly connected to the more northern origins of the Koryo-saram. Most Koryo-saram in New York now speak Russian, English, and to some extent the Korean standard. The Koryo-saram descend from ethnic Korean immigrants to Russia, especially the Russian Far East, who faced forced mass migration to Central Asia in 1937.

Ossetian

Ирон Æвзаг
The Ossetian language, sometimes also called Ossetic, is spoken by over half a million ethnic Ossetes, who live in two neighboring political entities in the central region of the Caucasus mountains. ELA worked with Konstantin Slante (Slanov), a New York-based speaker from South Ossetia, to record texts and explore certain aspects of the highly under-described Kudar dialect, with an additional goal of glossing and translating stories from a published version of the Ossetian Nart saga. Read more here.

Russian

Русский
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.

Russian Sign Language

русский жестовый язык
Though precise information is lacking, there are reported to be numerous RSL users in the city with ties to a variety of former Soviet republics. Lower Ocean Parkway, near Brighton Beach, was reported to one of several possible places where RSL users live or gather.

Turkish

Türkçe
New York's major Turkish-speaking concentrations are in and around Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn, where the American Turkish Eyüp Sultan Cultural Center is a gathering place, and Sunnyside in Queens (home to the Turkish Cultural Center Queens), with a substantial community as well in Paterson, New Jersey (centered in part on the United Islamic Center). This includes speakers of a number of Oghuz varieties from west of the Caucasus, including Istanbul, Black Sea, Anatolian, and Bulgarian Turkish — as well as speakers of Cypriot Turkish, who have a community in the Bronx.

Tuvan

Тыва
Byaambakhuu Darinchuluun of the Mongolian Heritage Foundation estimates that there are just 10 or so Tuvan speakers in New York, with some connected to the Russian-speaking world in Brighton Beach. Gatherings are held around the city with speakers of Mongolic languages including Mongolian, Buryat, and Kalmyk, as well as speakers of Hazara.

Ukrainian

Українська
Large numbers of immigrants from what is today Ukraine first arrived in New York in the 1880s. Many in the earliest period were Lemkos (or Carpatho-Rusyns) from western Ukraine; many others were also Yiddish-speaking Jews. In the mid-20th century, a distinctive Little Ukraine arose in what is now considered the East Village, including many refugees from Soviet rule in Ukraine and a significant number of intellectuals, writers, and artists. Other Ukrainian communities have formed in Brooklyn (where the Little Odessa in Brighton Beach was at first primarily Jewish but came to include more recent Ukrainian immigrants), and in Queens among Polish neighbors. Significant Ukrainian communities and institutions exist in central New Jersey (mother church of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church) and upstate New York (the Soyuzivka Heritage Center) as well.

Uyghur

ئۇيغۇر
Facing repression in China, a growing New York Uyghur diaspora, though smaller than the community in northern Virginia, is living in areas of Brooklyn and Queens. Many apparently came via Uzbekistan, which has a substantial Uyghur diaspora community. Brooklyn's Cafe Kashkar is the longest-running Uyghur restaurant in the city, catering largely to a Central Asian and Russian-speaking clientele while Flushing's Nurlan was started by a Uyghur immigrant who came after many years in Germany, caters largely to the local Chinese community.

Volga Tatar

Идел-Урал Tатарча
Several distinct but related Tatar communities have settled in New York City over the past century or more. Soon after arriving in Ellis Island in the late 19th/early 20th century from Lithuania, Poland, and Belarus, Lipka ("Lithuanian") Tatars from western areas of the Tatar-speaking world bought a building on 104 Powers St. in their newfound home of Williamsburg — establishing North America's oldest surviving mosque. At its most active from the 1930s to 1960s, the mosque today still attracts Tatars from the wider region who return on special days like Kurban Bayrami (the name for Eid al-Adha). A later influx of Tatars from various backgrounds, including many from the former Soviet Union, have a long-standing community in eastern Queens, where the American Tatar Association makes its home in College Point, while some Volga Tatars are part of the Russian-speaking matrix of Brighton Beach.
Additional languages spoken in this neighborhood:
  • Eastern Armenian
  • Georgian
  • Kalmyk
  • Tajik
  • Yakut
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Brighton Beach

Brooklyn

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