Neighborhood

Sheepshead Bay

Brooklyn
In the Census-defined PUMA including Sheepshead Bay, Gerritsen Beach & Homecrest, according to recent Census data, (in descending order), Russian, Cantonese, Hebrew, Urdu, Italian, Yiddish, and Ukrainian each have more than 1000 speakers. Varieties of English, Spanish, and Chinese are commonly spoken in the area as well.
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Belarusian

Беларуская
Many Belarusians arriving in New York after the Second World War were drawn to the Eastern European matrix, primarily Ukrainian, in what is now considered the East Village. It was this community that helped established the St. Cyril of Turau church in 1950, originally located on East 4th Street before it moved to its current Boerum Hill location in 1957—where it is a magnet for Belarusians across Brooklyn. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, some Belarusians have found a home much further south, near the Russian-speaking world of Sheepshead Bay and Brighton Beach, where Belarussian Xata was for a while a popular restaurant.

Dungan

Хуэйзў
Dungan is a Sinitic language, similar to other forms of Chinese spoken in northwest China, carried by its Muslim speakers to Central Asia during a series of wars and expulsions in the late 19th century. One family from Kazakhstan opened Lagman House, the first Dungan restaurant in New York (and maybe the US, or the Western Hemisphere), though it is now closed.

Eastern Armenian

Արևելահայերեն
While most earlier Armenian arrivals to New York City were speakers of the Western Armenian varieties common in the Ottoman Empire, speakers of Eastern Armenian (spoken today in the nation of Armenia) began to arrive in larger numbers following the fall of Soviet Union.

Kazakh

Қазақша
Far smaller than the Uzbek and Bukharian Jewish communities which number in the tens of thousands, the Kazakh community in New York has nonetheless grown substantially in recent years, and there are many Kazakhs now living among Russians and other Central Asians in Brooklyn and Queens or in Manhattan. There may also be a small number of ethnic Kazakhs from China living in Flushing.

Romansh

Rumantsch
The late Romansh speaker Amalia Malchiodi, originally from Sagogn but long resident in Brooklyn, worked with the Endangered Language Alliance to record stories in her Sursilvan dialect. Her son Giancarlo spoke the language as a boy, but later switched to English — though he has recently turned back to the language.

Tajik

Тоҷики
A growing Tajik-speaking community lives primarily in areas around Bay Parkway, Sheepshead Bay, and Brighton Beach including not just Tajik speakers from Tajikistan but also Pamiris for whom Tajik is a second language and those from the Tajik-speaking areas of Bukhara and Samarkand in Uzbekistan. Some, including many Pamiris (native speakers of Shughni) live near the Ismaili Jamatkhana in Queens, where Bukhori (a Jewish variety of Tajik) is also a prominent neighborhood language.
Additional languages spoken in this neighborhood:
  • Cantonese
  • Russian
  • Turkish
  • Uzbek
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