Neighborhood

Brooklyn Heights

Brooklyn
In the Census-defined PUMA including Brooklyn Heights & Fort Greene, according to recent Census data, (in descending order), Yiddish, French, Cantonese, and Mandarin 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:

Castilian Spanish

Castellano
Many early Spanish-speaking New Yorkers were from Spain's northern coast and likely spoke as Galician, Basque, or Asturian as a mother tongue. They came in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to Manhattan's Little Spain in what is today's Chelsea and West Village, with some remaining institutions clustered around 14th Street around 7th Avenue, notably La Nacional - Spanish Benevolent Society, a fraternal organization since 1868 and the oldest Spanish cultural institution in the US. Uptown, the Hispanic Society Museum and Library has been a gathering place especially for American admirers and scholars of all things Spanish. A notable Spanish cluster also once existed in Brooklyn Heights, connected to the nearby docks.

Galician

Galego
Natives of Galicia, from northwestern Spain, first arrived in New York as the largest wave of Spaniards in the late 19th century. "Pequeña España" (Little Spain) consequently grew along the Hudson River from Christopher Street to 23rd Street, and became home to over 15,000 Spanish immigrants. This multicultural Spanish community established La Nacional in 1868, whose primary goal was to promote friendship amongst Spaniards in New York, but also many specifically Galician institutions. Spain's languages (including Galician) could be heard spoken across Chelsea and the West Village for decades, with many refugees from the Spanish Civil War joining the community in the 1930s. Galician-owned restaurants and businesses opened to sell familiar foods and housewares to the community, like Casa Moneo, which drew in the growing community of Caribbean Spanish speakers, selling chorizo, gallon cans of olive oil, and other staples. In addition to working along the Brooklyn waterfront, many Galicians have since moved out of Manhattan's Little Spain to Queens (home to Casa Galicia) and the Ironbound District of Newark, New Jersey, where institutions like the Centro Ourensano (a social club for those from Ourense, an area in Galicia) and Casa d'Paco keep Galician cuisine and traditions alive.

German

Deutsch
German-speaking communities developed rapidly across Brooklyn in the mid-late 19th century, when it was still an independent city. From Brooklyn Heights to Bushwick, this included working-class areas for industrial workers as well as mansions in areas like Clinton Hill and Bedford-Stuyvesant for wealthy German-American entrepreneurs like Charles Pfizer, whose pharmaceuticals were manufactured in Williamsburg. Today the bilingual Zion German Evangelical Lutheran Church in Brooklyn Heights remains from that era while also welcoming more recent waves of German speakers who have settled in Brooklyn.

Hainanese (Southern Min)

海南话
Hainanese, a variety of Southern Min Chinese from China's island province of Hainan, is still used by some of the older members of Brooklyn's Hai Nan Association, founded in the 1950s by then-recent immigrants. Some in the younger generation can reportedly still use it to communicate with their grandparents.

North Levantine Arabic

(اللهجة الشامية (الشمالية
Most early Arabic speakers in New York, primarily Levantine Christians from the Ottoman Province of Lebanon, began to arrive in the 19th century, originally settling in the "Little Syria" along Washington Street in a then deeply diverse pocket of lower Manhattan. As the "Syrians in New York" research initiative demonstrated, many factors, ultimately including construction of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, drove the community to Brooklyn — first South Ferry (now known as Boerum Hill) and later primarily Bay Ridge (where Palestinian New Yorkers have formed the organization Beit Hanania). Yonkers, and Paterson, New Jersey also have significant Levantine-Arabic speaking communities.
Additional languages spoken in this neighborhood:
  • Danish
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Brooklyn Heights

Brooklyn

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