Neighborhood

Bushwick

Brooklyn
In the Census-defined PUMA including East Williamsburg & Bushwick, according to recent Census data, (in descending order) French, Haitian Creole, Mandarin, and Cantonese each have more than 500 speakers. English and Spanish varieties are widely spoken in the area as well, with Spanish speakers roughly 50% of the PUMA.
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Languages with a significant site in this neighborhood, marked by a point on the map:

Central American Spanish

Español Centroamericano
New York City is home to a tremendous diversity of Spanish varieties, largely mutually intelligible but highly distinctive along regional, ethnic, and local lines — for this map, as among speakers themselves, national distinctions (e.g. Peruvian Spanish, Colombian Spanish) are used even though these do not completely capture the nature of the diversity. Many early Spanish-speaking New Yorkers were Galicians or Castilians living in Manhattan's Little Spain in today's Chelsea or Brooklyn Heights, connected to the port or cigar-making; others were Latin Americans, especially Cubans and Puerto Ricans, who arrived as political refugees or cigar makers in the late 19th century or else after the Spanish-American War of 1898 made those U.S. territories. The largest waves comprised Puerto Rican Spanish speakers following the Second World War and Dominican Spanish speakers starting in the 1960s and 70s, making Caribbean Spanish varieties dominant in the city. Other major communities include the Mexican, Ecuadorian, Colombian, Central American, and Peruvian Spanish speakers who have settled in various zones throughout the metropolitan area, though there are also individuals and communities from virtually every Spanish-speaking community in the world. Spanish and English also mix in the city in distinctive ways, producing in some contexts a code-switching "Spanglish" associated particularly with long-resident Puerto Rican New Yorkers, also known as Nuyoricans.

Ecuadorian Spanish

Español Ecuatoriano
Ecuadorians form by far the largest South American community in the city, and New York is the undisputed capital of Ecuadorian-American life. Starting in the 1960s and 1970s with a more middle-class professional group migrating especially from around Guayaquil, the NYC community increased dramatically following economic turmoil in the 1990s with large numbers coming from across the country but especially the heavily Indigenous (sometimes Kichwa-speaking) south-central highlands of Azuay-Cañar. A range of Queens neighborhoods including Corona and Ridgewood are major centers, but there are also sizeable communities in Bushwick, Parkchester, and many towns in New Jersey and upstate New York.

Lukumí

Lukumí
Lukumí is the liturgical language of Santería, a religion formed by enslaved Yoruba people brought to the New World. With roots in Yoruba religion, Christianity, and Indigenous American traditions, Santería has been practiced since the 16th century and persists among Afro-Cuban and other communities of New York City. The Lukumí language consists of a fixed set of Yoruba words and phrases (generally pronounced with Spanish intonation), many of which are now specific to Santería practices and may not be understood by modern-day practitioners. With Santería a significant force among the city's Afro-Caribbean and Latino communities, stores like Fordham's Original Products Botanica and Bushwick's Botanica Orisha Lucumi play a vital role by selling religious products like candles, oils, and herbs to both practitioners and laypeople.

Mexican Spanish

Español Mexicano
NYC's Mexican population tripled in the 1990s, with the largest numbers arriving from Puebla and later Guerrero, south-central states with large Indigenous communities, though today there are more from the Mexico City area and the entire country. One informal survey found that up to 17 percent of Mexican New Yorkers may speak an Indigenous language, with Mixtec and Nahuatl varieties the most widely spoken, possibly by tens of thousands—some of whom learn Spanish in New York. Mexicans have largely settled throughout the metro area, usually in Spanish-speaking neighborhoods first settled by Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, but there are signs now of distinctly Mexican areas and a host of institutions created by the community.

Mixtec

Tu'un Savi
Members of Ti Toro Miko, a collective of Indigenous migrants from Guerrero now in New York, many of them Mixtec-speaking, are working to support communities back home and maintain their language and culture. In 2021, they opened a space in Bushwick to sell artisanal products in support of this goal.

Réunion Creole

Kréol Rénioné
The Bushwick restaurant Maloya serves food and drinks from the island of Réunion and is named for a resonant word (also the name of a musical genre) in its French-based creole, which contains elements of several other languages from across the world of the Indian Ocean.
Additional languages spoken in this neighborhood:
  • Dominican Spanish
  • Ecuadorian Kichwa
  • Garifuna
  • German
  • Puerto Rican Spanish
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Bushwick

Brooklyn

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