Neighborhood

Lower East Side

Manhattan
In the Census-defined PUMA including Chinatown & Lower East Side, according to recent Census data, (in descending order) Cantonese, Mandarin, and French each have at least 1000 speakers. English and Spanish 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:

Abakuá

Abakuá
As described in a pioneering study by Lydia Cabrera, Abakuá is an Afro-Cuban esoteric ritual language, of which there are at least a few speakers in the NYC area, including some who would perform regularly at the Cuban restaurant Mi Salsa Kitchen.

Arbëresh

Arbërisht
Arriving within the large Southern Italian immigrant wave beginning in the late 19th century, Arbëresh speakers (from places such as Vaccarizzo, San Cosmo Albanese, Frascineto, and Acquaformosa in Calabria and Greci in Campania) came to live within broader Italian neighborhoods, beginning in Little Italy and later in the Bronx, Staten Island, and likely elsewhere. According to community historians, the substantial community of the Inwood-Lawrence-Rockaway area on the South Shore of Long Island was largely from Cerzeto, San Martino di Finita, and surrounding Arbëresh villages. From 1904 to 1946, the Arbëresh priest Papas Ciro Pinnola created a parish within the Archdiocese of New York, unique in North America, dedicated to the distinctive (Greek-language) Byzantine Catholic rite of the Italo-Albanian Church. In recent years, the rite has been revived at Our Lady of Grace church on Staten Island.

Fujianese

福建话
A large wave of working-class Fujianese speakers, especially from in and around the city of Fuzhou in China's Fujian Province, arrived in New York in the 1980s and 90s, after China loosened its emigration restrictions. At the time, Manhattan's Chinatown was dominated by Cantonese speakers from China's Guangdong Province, so Fujianese people settled in and around East Broadway, where Chinatown slowly expanded. Today, most Fujianese New Yorkers speak Mandarin as well and have spread across the city's Chinese neighborhoods, including Sunset Park, Bensonhurst, and Flushing. The Fujianese spoken in Fuzhou is also called Eastern Min, highlighting its connections to a wider group of related Sinitic languages. Also spoken to a lesser degree in New York are forms of Northern Min, from the northern part of Fujian: one example being several speakers from the area around Jianyang and Wuyishan, where neighboring villages may speak very differently. Forms of Southern Min are also related and to some extent heard in New York's Chinese neighborhoods, including Hainanese, Teochew, and Taiwanese — the latter also called Hokkien and widely spoken in the Southeast Asian Chinese diaspora.

Judeo-Greek

Romaniyot
Judeo-Greek (also called Yevanic) is the variety of Greek long retained by the Romaniote Jewish community in and around the town of Ioannina in western Greece. While there is little documentation about this variety and apparently no remaining speakers, there are still thousands of members of the Ioannina community living in and around New York, who may remember some words. The symbolic heart of the community remains Kehila Kedosha Janina, built in 1927 on the Lower East Side and known as only Romaniote synagogue in the Western hemisphere. Romaniote Jews additionally clustered and established synagogues, in which Ladino-speaking Jews from Greece often also participated, in Harlem, Brooklyn, and the Bronx.

Judeo-Spanish

Ladino
The earliest documented Ladino-speaking community in NYC formed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a cluster in and around Broome and Allen streets within the larger Yiddish-speaking matrix of the mostly Yiddish-speaking Lower East Side, though there were tensions with Yiddish speakers (who often questioned the Jewishness of non-Yiddish speakers). It was in this area that an active Ladino press first formed (La Vara the longest-standing publication) and that the first synagogues and social clubs for Ladino speakers took root. Many Sephardim initially left for Harlem, where a Ladino-speaking cluster formed in the 1910s and 1920s, with larger numbers moving to Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx after.

Puerto Rican Spanish

Español Puertorriqueño
Puerto Ricans began moving to the mainland United States in significant numbers in the late 19th century, bringing with them their unique variety of Caribbean Spanish. The Great Migration following the Second World War brought tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans to the city each year, making Puerto Rican Spanish the dominant form of Spanish in New York for much of the 20th century in major barrios including East Harlem, the Lower East Side (sometimes called Loisaida), Williamsburg, Bushwick, and much of the Bronx. Proudly Nuyorican poets like Miguel Algarín and Tato Laviera, blending Puerto Rican and New York culture, forged a distinctive, poetic Spanglish. Today, Puerto Rican Spanish speakers live throughout the city, but an increasing number are moving to suburban areas of Westchester, New Jersey, and other states.

Romani

Romani
Many of the earliest Roma communities in New York formed on the Lower East Side/East Village among other immigrant communities from Southern and Eastern Europe, and for some the city was a seasonal base. Following the Second World War and the 1956 revolution in Hungary came a Hungarian Roma community, including many musicians. There is no community center, according to Roma scholar Ian Hancock, but some Pentecostal churches have large Romani American congregations and a Romani-owned restaurant in the Bowery was at one point a gathering place. Later, many came to be most concentrated in Greenwich Village, with fortune telling as a major source of income. There are also reports of a Lovari community in Newark.

Syrian Judeo-Arabic

اللهجة السورية اليهودية
The Syrian Jewish community based in Brooklyn, with a secondary hub in Deal, New Jersey, is thought to represent the single largest group of Jews from Syria in the world, estimated as having 40,000 members or more. There are distinct communities, with distinct Brooklyn synagogues, that have roots in Aleppo and Damascus. Migration began to the Lower East Side and later Williamsburg in the early 20th century, with the community now centered along Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn. A last significant wave of Syrian Jews in the 1990s. The community has been characterized both by its cohesiveness and by the large number of synagogues and other institutions built in Brooklyn. Most no longer speak the distinctively Jewish form of the local Arabic of Aleppo or Damascus but have switched to English or Arabic, though significant musical and liturgical traditions are being maintained.

Vietnamese

Tiếng Việt
Few Vietnamese speakers lived in New York before 1975, when the fall of Saigon drove large numbers of South Vietnamese to come to the United States as refugees. Some Vietnamese migrants had married U.S. servicemen, but a much larger number, including many Hoa (or ethnic Chinese), came as "boat people" fleeing repression in the following years. A substantial Vietnamese community, speaking Southern varieties, called New York home by the 1990s, with no single center but concentrations in or near Chinese areas of Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan (considering degrees of cultural and linguistic kinship) and an apparently more heavily Kinh community in the Bronx with its own Buddhist temple (Chieu Kien) and a Vietnamese-language mass at St. Nicholas of Tolentine. Quite distinct is a smaller grouping of North Vietnamese who have come as educational migrants and professionals in recent years.

Yiddish

יידיש
When the Lower East Side became one of the most densely populated places on the planet in the early 20th century, it also became one of the world's major Yiddish-speaking centers. Following German (including German-Jewish) settlement in the mid-19th century, Yiddish speakers from across Central and Eastern Europe formed a number of distinct zones (for Jews from the Russian Empire, Galician Jews, Hungarian Jews etc) within the Lower East Side. Yiddish served as the common language, however, and was soon put to uses that were often restricted in Europe. Second Avenue became the world center of Yiddish theater, a massive Yiddish press and many schools of Yiddish literature flourished, and even a labor movement grew up around the language.
Additional languages spoken in this neighborhood:
  • Hebrew
  • Hungarian
  • Romanian
  • Sylheti
  • Taíno
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Lower East Side

Manhattan

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County
Language
Endonym
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Global Speakers
Language Family
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AbakuáAbakuá

Caribbean

  • Cuba flag
    Cuba
Lower East Side

Smallest

Liturgical
AbazaАбаза

Western Asia

  • Turkey flag
    Turkey
  • Russia flag
    Russia
49,800
Abkhaz-Adyge
Wayne (NJ)

Smallest

Residential
Abruzzese (Orsognese)Abruzzésë

Southern Europe

  • Italy flag
    Italy
Indo-European
Astoria

Small

Residential
Abruzzese (Orsognese)Abruzzésë

Southern Europe

  • Italy flag
    Italy
Indo-European
Little Italy

Small

Historical
AcehneseBahsa Acèh

Southeastern Asia

  • Indonesia flag
    Indonesia
3,500,000
Austronesian
Astoria

Smallest

Community
AcehneseBahsa Acèh

Southeastern Asia

  • Indonesia flag
    Indonesia
3,500,000
Austronesian
Elmhurst

Smallest

Residential
AdjoukrouMɔjukru

Western Africa

  • Ivory Coast flag
    Ivory Coast
140,000
Atlantic-Congo
Concourse

Smallest

Residential
AdygheК|ахыбзэ

Western Asia

  • Turkey flag
    Turkey
  • Russia flag
    Russia
117,500
Abkhaz-Adyge
Wayne (NJ)

Small

Residential
AfenmaiAfenmai

Western Africa

  • Nigeria flag
    Nigeria
270,000
Atlantic-Congo
Castle Hill

Smallest

Residential
African-American EnglishBlack English

Northern America

  • United States flag
    United States
45,109,521
Indo-European
Bedford-Stuyvesant

Largest

Residential
African-American EnglishBlack English

Northern America

  • United States flag
    United States
45,109,521
Indo-European
Newark (NJ)

Largest

Residential
African-American EnglishBlack English

Northern America

  • United States flag
    United States
45,109,521
Indo-European
Clifton

Largest

Residential
African-American EnglishBlack English

Northern America

  • United States flag
    United States
45,109,521
Indo-European
Hollis

Largest

Residential
African-American EnglishBlack English

Northern America

  • United States flag
    United States
45,109,521
Indo-European
Edenwald

Largest

Residential
African-American EnglishBlack English

Northern America

  • United States flag
    United States
45,109,521
Indo-European
Central Harlem

Largest

Residential
African-American EnglishBlack English

Northern America

  • United States flag
    United States
45,109,521
Indo-European
Hempstead (NY)

Large

Residential
AfrikaansAfrikaans

Southern Africa

  • South Africa flag
    South Africa
  • Zimbabwe flag
    Zimbabwe
17,543,580
Indo-European
Murray Hill

Small

Community
AkanAkan

Western Africa

  • Ghana flag
    Ghana
9,231,300
Atlantic-Congo
Flatbush

Small

Residential
AkanAkan

Western Africa

  • Ghana flag
    Ghana
9,231,300
Atlantic-Congo
Shore Acres

Small

Residential
AkanAkan

Western Africa

  • Ghana flag
    Ghana
9,231,300
Atlantic-Congo
University Heights

Large

Residential

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An urban language map

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