Oʻzbekcha
Uzbek
- Global speakers: 25,164,820
- Glottocode: nort2690
- ISO 639-3: uzn, uzs
North America's largest Uzbek community — and one of the largest outside the former Soviet Union — runs roughly along Coney Island Avenue from near Ditmas Avenue, where a community from Samarkand has reportedly taken root, as far down as Brighton Beach, with many from Tashkent living near Avenues X, Y, Z. Brooklyn is home to the Uzbek American Community Center. A smaller community lives in Queens, and a significant number of Bukharian Jews, though more likely to speak Russian and Bukhori, also have knowledge of Uzbek. The Turkistanian American Association draws in New Jersey Uzbeks. According to writer Zohra Saed, an earlier wave of Cold War-era migrants, including Afghan Uzbeks, settled in southern Brooklyn and later in New Jersey and Long Island suburbs. According to 2015-2019 American Community Survey data, there are some 4,935 Uzbekistan-born speakers of "Other Asian Languages" in Kings County. (For privacy reasons, there must be a minimum of 10,000 speakers across the U.S. for a language to appear in the public data.) The American Community Survey also found 19,021 Uzbekistan-born speakers of Russian — some may be ethnic Russians who do not speak Uzbek and some may be ethnic Uzbeks dominant in Russian, but a large number also likely speak Uzbek.
Sites
NYC neighborhoods or towns in the metro region where the language community has a significant site, marked by a point on the map: