Neighborhood

West Village

Manhattan
In the Census-defined PUMA including Battery Park City, Greenwich Village & Soho, according to recent Census data, (in descending order) French, Italian, Cantonese, Mandarin, and Russian 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:

Castilian Spanish

Castellano
Many early Spanish-speaking New Yorkers were from Spain's northern coast and likely spoke as Galician, Basque, or Asturian as a mother tongue. They came in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to Manhattan's Little Spain in what is today's Chelsea and West Village, with some remaining institutions clustered around 14th Street around 7th Avenue, notably La Nacional - Spanish Benevolent Society, a fraternal organization since 1868 and the oldest Spanish cultural institution in the US. Uptown, the Hispanic Society Museum and Library has been a gathering place especially for American admirers and scholars of all things Spanish. A notable Spanish cluster also once existed in Brooklyn Heights, connected to the nearby docks.

Finnish

Suomi
Finnish immigration to the U.S. hit a peak between 1910 and 1925, forming a strong community within the wider Scandinavian matrix of Sunset Park, near port and dock areas of Brooklyn. This "Finntown" grew around the 8th Avenue Alku and Alku Toinen, two co-ops built by Finnish socialists in 1916. Known as the first non-profit housing cooperatives in the U.S., these experiments inspired dozens of other (Finnish and non-Finnish) cooperative houses, restaurants, stores, and garages around Sunset Park. By the 1970s, most Sunset Park Finns had moved out to Long Island, New Jersey, and Connecticut, but a Finnish church remains in Greenwich Village, and there are scattered speakers throughout the New York area. In the early 20th century, another major community, now gone, was in Harlem, concentrated east of Lenox Avenue in the 120s.

Galician

Galego
Natives of Galicia, from northwestern Spain, first arrived in New York as the largest wave of Spaniards in the late 19th century. "Pequeña España" (Little Spain) consequently grew along the Hudson River from Christopher Street to 23rd Street, and became home to over 15,000 Spanish immigrants. This multicultural Spanish community established La Nacional in 1868, whose primary goal was to promote friendship amongst Spaniards in New York, but also many specifically Galician institutions. Spain's languages (including Galician) could be heard spoken across Chelsea and the West Village for decades, with many refugees from the Spanish Civil War joining the community in the 1930s. Galician-owned restaurants and businesses opened to sell familiar foods and housewares to the community, like Casa Moneo, which drew in the growing community of Caribbean Spanish speakers, selling chorizo, gallon cans of olive oil, and other staples. In addition to working along the Brooklyn waterfront, many Galicians have since moved out of Manhattan's Little Spain to Queens (home to Casa Galicia) and the Ironbound District of Newark, New Jersey, where institutions like the Centro Ourensano (a social club for those from Ourense, an area in Galicia) and Casa d'Paco keep Galician cuisine and traditions alive.

Kalderash Romani

Kalderashitska
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.

Kumeyaay

Kumiai
Rick Chavolla, board chair of the American Indian Community House, is Kumeyaay from California and living in the West Village as of 2018. As of that year, the American Indian Community House, which has represented New York's Native community for decades, reported members belonging to 72 different Native North American tribes.

Piedmontese

Piemontèis
Despite the overwhelming presence of southerners, almost all of Italy's substantial linguistic diversity has at one time or another been represented in the New York City area. Northern Italians, especially Ligurians from Chiavari south of Genoa, but also those from Piedmont and Tuscany, were numerous among the earlier arrivals in the mid-19th century, but there also appears to have been a variety of other northerners. Relatively little is known about the trajectory of the smaller northern Italian communities, which seem to have started moving out of Little Italy already in the 1880s towards the southern section of Greenwich Village, where many worked as artisans and assimilated relatively rapidly.
Additional languages spoken in this neighborhood:
  • Catalan
  • French
  • Lenape (Munsee)
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West Village

Manhattan

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