Neighborhood

Williamsburg

Brooklyn
In the Census-defined PUMA including Greenpoint & Williamsburg, according to recent Census data, (in descending order) Yiddish (with over 25,000), Polish, Hebrew, French, 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:

Cilentano

Cilendano
Cilentano varieties from the Italian region of Campania, including parts of the province of Salerno, are spoken by a number of different communities in New York, including those with roots in Sacco (with the Associazione Sacchesi D'America in Whitestone), Sanza (with the Society-St Mary of the Snow in Williamsburg), and Caggiano (with the Association Caggianesi D’America in Gravesend).

Hasidic Yiddish

חסידיש אידיש
Dozens of distinct Hasidic communities took root in Brooklyn after the Holocaust, which decimated and uprooted all Hasidic groups across Europe. As the communities grew, they would prove an exception to the broader shift of Yiddish speakers to English, retaining the language into the third and now fourth generations. The major centers have been Williamsburg, a world center for the Satmar Hasidic dynasty, and Borough Park, where Satmar, Bobov, and many other groups come into contact— with something similar now happening in suburban Rockland and Orange counties. Smaller numbers are in Queens, the Five Towns, and increasingly elsewhere across the metro region. The result has been what is arguably a new kind of lingua franca, sometimes called Hasidic Yiddish, based on Southern Yiddish dialects but distinctive for its English, Hebrew, and Aramaic loanwords.

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.

Neapolitan

Nnapulitano
Neapolitan, a lingua franca spoken across much of southern Italy for centuries, remained to some degree a lingua franca for the mostly southern Italian immigrants who entered New York in large numbers beginning in the late 19th century. In the following decades, Neapolitan music, particularly songs sung in Neapolitan, became big business both in Italy and New York. To some extent, local related varieties from surrounding provinces are also grouped under Neapolitan, though they remain distinct. In the New York area, this has included "Irpino" speakers such as the many Sturnese speakers from Sturno (Avellino province) who came to work in mansions on the North Shore of Long Island (later in landscaping and in light bulb factories) and now make up a significant community in Glen Cove. Likewise Long Island City's Societa Sant’ Amato Di Nusco has represented speakers of Nuscano from the town of Nusco (also Avellino).

Ningbo

宁波话
Most Chinese speakers in the city, from the first half of the 19th century until the second half of the 20th, spoke southern Chinese varieties, notably forms of Taishanese and Cantonese, but significant numbers of speakers of northern Chinese varieties including official Mandarin, began arriving especially after the Second World War. Many were from Taiwan and established a community in and around Flushing, where other Chinese immigrants from all over gradually joined them. Today, with the largest Chinese population outside of Asia, the entire metro area is home to an extraordinary variety of Sinitic (Chinese) languages even beyond the most widely spoken (Mandarin, Cantonese, Fujianese, Taishanese, Wenzhounese, Hakka). Some represent distinct but related varieties of these (e.g. Northern Fujianese, Taiwanese, Teochew, and Hainanese are all part of the Min group, with the Fuzhou variety of Fujianese by far the most common in New York) but others are highly distinct. Reports about other smaller Chinese languages communities in the city are scarce, but within the Mandarin subgroup there seem to be substantial numbers of speakers of Northeastern Mandarin and Sichuanese, and within the Wu subgroup substantial numbers of speakers of Shanghainese and Changzhounese. There are an unknown number of speakers of Gan (Jiangxi) and Xiang (Hunan) and probably many other varieties, likely not living as distinct communities, but within a larger Chinese matrix where Mandarin (as in China itself) is increasingly the lingua franca and valorized standard.

Ojibwe

Anashinaabemowin
A small cluster of Anishinaabemowin speakers living near Grand Street in Williamsburg included the poet Nicole Wallace as of 2019.

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.

Rusyn

Русиньскый
Rusyns (also called Carpatho-Rusyns or Ruthenians) descend from an East Slavic group based in the Carpathian mountains in modern-day Ukraine, Slovakia, and Poland. Some may also consider themselves Lemkos. New York's Rusyn community started developing in the late 1880s, with another wave coming after the Second World War, and communities developing around other Ukrainians, Belarusians, Poles, and Slavic groups. The Rusyn community established Williamsburg's Russian Orthodox Cathedral of the Transfiguration, a hub beginning in 1921 and several institutions in Yonkers. Many from around the metropolitan area continue to gather at the St. Nicholas Church in the East Village. Today speakers are scattered in Brooklyn, Staten Island, and various towns in both northern New Jersey (Paterson, Clifton) and south from Elizabeth and Perth Amboy to Manville.

Tatar

Tatarca
Several distinct but related Tatar communities have settled in New York City over the past century or more. Soon after arriving in Ellis Island in the late 19th/early 20th century from Lithuania, Poland, and Belarus, Lipka ("Lithuanian") Tatars from western areas of the Tatar-speaking world bought a building on 104 Powers St. in their newfound home of Williamsburg — establishing North America's oldest surviving mosque. At its most active from the 1930s to 1960s, the mosque today still attracts Tatars from the wider region who return on special days like Kurban Bayrami (the name for Eid al-Adha). A later influx of Tatars from various backgrounds, including many from the former Soviet Union, have a long-standing community in eastern Queens, where the American Tatar Association makes its home in College Point, while some Volga Tatars are part of the Russian-speaking matrix of Brighton Beach.

Ukrainian

Українська
Large numbers of immigrants from what is today Ukraine first arrived in New York in the 1880s. Many in the earliest period were Lemkos (or Carpatho-Rusyns) from western Ukraine; many others were also Yiddish-speaking Jews. In the mid-20th century, a distinctive Little Ukraine arose in what is now considered the East Village, including many refugees from Soviet rule in Ukraine and a significant number of intellectuals, writers, and artists. Other Ukrainian communities have formed in Brooklyn (where the Little Odessa in Brighton Beach was at first primarily Jewish but came to include more recent Ukrainian immigrants), and in Queens among Polish neighbors. Significant Ukrainian communities and institutions exist in central New Jersey (mother church of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church) and upstate New York (the Soyuzivka Heritage Center) as well.
Additional languages spoken in this neighborhood:
  • German
  • Mandarin
  • Nones
  • Slovak
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Williamsburg

Brooklyn

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