Neighborhood

Maspeth

Queens
In the Census-defined PUMA including Ridgewood, Glendale & Midlde Village, according to recent Census data, (in descending order) Polish (with over 15,000), Italian, Albanian, Romanian, German, Cantonese, and Russian each have more than 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:

Lenape (Munsee)

Lunaape
Besides the southern bit of what is now New York, traditional Lenape-speaking territory encompasses New Jersey, northern Delaware, and eastern Pennsylvania, where people lived in a constellation of separate, but linguistically and culturally similar, bands — 40 or more of them with a few hundred members each. In New Jersey, there were the Raritans, the Haverstraw, the Tappan, the Hackensack, the Minisinks, and others; in what is now New York City, the Canarsee, the Nayack, the Rockaway, and others. Across the Lenape world, at least three closely related languages were probably spoken: Southern Unami, Northern Unami, and Munsee (the northern variety associated with most of today's metro NYC). Today, after centuries of dispersal and diaspora, the Lenape are in Ontario, with three officially recognized Lenape clusters at Moraviantown, Munsee, and the mixed Six Nations Reserve. They are in Oklahoma — two federally recognized Lenape tribes in the west and the east of the state — and they are at Stockbridge in Wisconsin. There are also a number of groups and individuals across New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and elsewhere who claim Lenape heritage. There are a few native speakers of Munsee remaining in Ontario, and revival efforts — including classes taught by Lenape language keeper Karen Hunter at the Endangered Language Alliance on 18th Street in Manaháhtaan and at Ramapough Lunaape Nation in Mahwah, New Jersey — are ongoing.

Lithuanian

Lietuvių
Driven by a famine and a series of insurrections, Lithuanian immigration to the U.S. began in 1850, with as many as 750,000 said to have arrived by 1918. While the largest community is in Chicago, there is a substantial and historic community in New York City which lived in proximity to Slavic communities, united by churches like the Annunciation in Williamsburg and the Transfiguration Roman Catholic Church in Maspeth, Queens, both with frequent services in Lithuanian. One affiliate of the church is the Knights of Lithuania organization, whose primary goals are to celebrate Lithuanian language, customs, and culture. Most Lithuanian Jews were native Yiddish speakers and settled among Jews. Lithuanian ("Lipka") Tatars have also been in New York for over a century, with a Williamsburg mosque still in the community.

Paraguayan Spanish

Español Paraguayo
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.

Polish

Polski
Like most European immigrants, Poles began arriving in large numbers at Ellis Island in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Large waves followed after the Second World War and again in the 1980s and 90s with the collpase of the Eastern Bloc. In recent decades, the city's best-known Polish community has been in Greenpoint, where Polish delis, bakeries, and butcher shops stretch along Manhattan Avenue, often bearing signs with no English translation, with churches, schools, and other community institutions to match. More recently, with gentrification and generational shift, much of the community has moved to the nearby neighborhoods of Maspeth and Ridgewood. Other Polish communities continue to thrive elsewhere in Brooklyn (Windsor Terrace, Borough Park) as well as in Manhattan (in the East Village, near other Slavic groups), as well as in many areas in New Jersey and Long Island.
Additional languages spoken in this neighborhood:
  • Tibetan
  • Walung
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Maspeth

Queens

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