Neighborhood

Corona

Queens
In the Census-defined PUMA including Elmhurst & South Corona, according to recent Census data, (in descending order) Bengali, Mandarin, Nepali, Cantonese, Hindi, and Tibetan each hold more than 1000 speakers. English, Spanish, and Tagalog 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:

Amuzgo

N̄omndaa
Amuzgo is spoken in the coastal areas of Guerrero and Oaxaca, two states in southern Mexico known for their cultural and linguistic diversity. Along with other Mexicans of Indigenous descent, Amuzgo speakers have started arriving in New York over the past few decades. ELA worked with one local speaker of Amuzgo, Jesus Santana, to further document aspects of Amuzgo grammar. Read more here.

Argentine Spanish

Español Rioplatense
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.

Cuban Spanish

Español Cubano
In the late 19th century, a significant community Cuban political refugees and cigar makers formed, with many working in lower Manhattan. Most famous among them was the writer and revolutionary José Martí, who helped forge a modern Cuba from his exile base in the city. Cubans continued to arrive after the Spanish-American War of 1898 made the island a US territory, and yet another wave after the Cuban revolution, now settling in parts of the Bronx, Queens (home to the long-time restaurant Rincon Criollo), and elsewhere. Union City and West New York, across the river in New Jersey, have since become "Havana on the Hudson", home to one of the largest and most organized Cuban-American communities outside Florida.

Dominican Spanish

Español Dominicano
The New York metropolitan area is home to what is by far the largest Dominican community outside the Dominican Republic, including hundreds of thousands of speakers of the island's distinctive variety of Caribbean Spanish. Though individuals came much earlier, the majority of Dominican New Yorkers today arrived beginning in the 1970s and 80s. Washington Heights remains a major center, though many have moved north into Inwood and the Bronx, and today every borough and many nearby suburbs have a substantial Dominican community. An earlier community in Corona, including especially of immigrants from the province of Cibao and even particular villages within it, has been expanding to Woodhaven, Cypress Hills, and East New York and increasingly now the smaller cities and suburbs of Westchester and New Jersey.

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.

Ixil

Ixil
Speakers of Ixil, an Indigenous Mayan language from the Quiche Department in the mountainous north of Guatemala, have been arriving in the United States in increasing numbers as economic and political refugees in recent years. While there are more visible Ixil-speaking communities in places including Centreville, VA and Dover, OH, there have also been reports of individual Ixil speakers in the New York metro area.

Kaqchikel

Kaqchikel
Along with other speakers of Indigenous Mayan languages of Guatemala, more and more Kaqchikel speakers have been arriving in the United States, to the point there the language has become one of the most frequently encountered by Border Patrol at the U.S. southern border. Together with K'iche' and Mam speakers, Kaqchikel speakers may constitute the most numerous Mayan group in the metropolitan area, with speakers within the Guatemalan communities in the city as well as in New Jersey and on Long Island (a community from San Raymundo now in Riverhead). In Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, one soccer team from the town of Pajoca is reported to speak Kaqchikel to each other in the fields.

Malagasy

Malagasy
As reported in 2016, a handful of Malagasy musicians founded NY Valiha, a sometime speakeasy and concert venue in Corona, named for the bamboo zither instrument native to Madagascar. Malagasy-language church services are offered by the Iangonana Kristianina Malagasy New York (Malagasy Christian Church of New York). Immigration from Madagascar to the U.S. is unusual, as few Malagasy speak English, and most go to nearby French-speaking islands in the Indian Ocean, Canada, or France itself. Performances at NY Valiha reportedly fuse traditional Malagasy folk music and contemporary indie rock. A Malagasy church was reported in Chelsea.

Mazahua

Jñatjo
One speaker of Mazahua, an Indigenous language of central Mexico, is a master artisan and dancer living in Newark who reports that there are speakers scattered around the New York metropolitan area, but little other information is available.

Mazatec

En Ngixo
There are reports of individual speakers of Mazatec, an Indigenous language of southern Mexico, in the New York metropolitan area, but little else is known.

Mexican Sign Language

Lengua de señas mexicana
Little information is available, but there have been multiple reports of at least individual signers of Mexican Sign Language in the city. In one notorious incident in 1997, dozens of Deaf Mexican migrants were trafficked and held in virtual captivity in Corona to work as street vendors, before their captors were arrested.

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
Mixtec speakers live within the large Mexican community in Queens, centered on Corona, though the extent of the community is not known.

Nahuatl

Nahuatl
Among Nahuatl speakers in Queens are many in Corona from Necoxtla, Veracruz and from Teopantlán, Puebla, both with representation in the Red de Pueblos Transnacionales. In Jackson Heights, a longtime collaborator of the Endangered Language Alliance originally from La Resurrección, Puebla is Irwin Sánchez, who is reviving the language through food.

Otomi

Hñähñu
Among Indigenous Otomi (Hñahñu) speakers in New York, there are many from the largely Hñahñu municipality of Texcatepec, in the Huasteca region of Veracruz. According to one estimate, of Texcatepec's 9,000 people, as many as 400 to 500 (mostly young men) were working in the New York City area, centered in the south Bronx.

Shuar

Šiwar Čičam
NYC Shuar Organization President Lino Wampusrik was living with his family in Queens as of 2018.

Tepehua

Hamasipini
Mexican-American photographer Cinthya Santos Briones, who is working with members of this Indigenous community from central Mexico, estimates there are around 20 speakers of Tepehua in New York City, living primarily between Elmhurst and Astoria.

Tzotzil

Bats'i K'op
Emigration from the Mexican state of Chiapas has been on a very small scale compared to the numbers coming from Puebla, Guerrero, and Oaxaca, but some individuals who have come to New York are speakers of one of the southern state's largest Indigenous Mayan languages, Tzotzil.
Additional languages spoken in this neighborhood:
  • Bhojpuri
  • Colombian Spanish
  • Ecuadorian Kichwa
  • K'iche'
  • Limi
  • Maithili
  • Peruvian Spanish
  • Puerto Rican Spanish
  • Tibetan
  • Wenzhounese
  • Zapotec
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Corona

Queens

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