Language

Kiswahili

Swahili
  • Global speakers: 18,027,740
  • Glottocode: swah1253
  • ISO 639-3: swa
Eastern AfricaTanzania flagTanzaniaKenya flagKenya
Census
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.
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Sites

NYC neighborhoods or towns in the metro region where the language community has a significant site, marked by a point on the map:

Brooklyn

Bedford-Stuyvesant
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Manhattan

Central Harlem
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Hudson

Jersey City (NJ)
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An urban language map

Welcome to Languages of New York City, a free and interactive digital map of the world’s most linguistically diverse metropolitan area.

All data, unless otherwise specified, is from the Endangered Language Alliance (ELA), based on information from communities, speakers, and other sources.

The map is a work in progress and a partial snapshot, focused on significant sites for Indigenous, minority, and endangered languages. Larger languages are represented selectively. To protect the privacy of speakers, some locations are slightly altered. Social media users, note that LANGUAGEMAP.NYC works best in a separate browser. We apologize that the map may not be fully accessible to all users, including the visually impaired.

This map was created by the Mapping Linguistic Diversity team, with core support from the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies and the Endangered Language Alliance. Please send feedback!

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