• ELA Data
• Census Data
• Contact and Feedback
• Credits
• Legal
• Sources

Introduction

With speakers of approximately 10 percent of the world’s 6000-7000 languages, the New York metropolitan area is the most linguistically diverse urban center in the world, probably in the history of the world.

From a thriving Algonquian language in pre-contact times, Lenape today is down to its last native speakers, but there are efforts to revitalize it, despite the sea of surrounding non-Indigenous languages with their own complex histories. Beginning in the colonial period, local languages were overrun by European languages, and by the early 20th century, New York had become a quintessential product of large-scale pan-European immigration.

Now, in the 21st century, New York City is hyperdiverse, with arrivals from areas of deep linguistic diversity across the globe, from the Himalaya to West Africa to the Indigenous zones of Mexico and Central America. Among its residents the city can count speakers of languages found virtually nowhere else, but the pressure to switch to rising world languages — like English, Spanish, Mandarin, Arabic, and Hindi — is intense.

Since 2010, the Endangered Language Alliance, motivated by worldwide language endangerment, has worked with speakers of over 100 distinct endangered and minority languages, including Lenape, an Indigenous language whose traditional territories include what is now New York City.

This map includes over 700 languages and dialects confirmed to over 1200 significant sites, including neighborhoods, community institutions, restaurants, and other locations where there is, or was, at least one speaker. In terms of geographic diversity, approximately 38% of the languages shown are from Asia, 24% from Africa, 19% from Europe, 16% from the Americas, and the rest from Oceania and the Pacific. 

Languages of New York City is not meant to be comprehensive, and it will always be incomplete, just a snapshot of Babel.

For now, the map itself is in English, due to the scale and limited resources, but we recommend the Google Translate extensions for Safari, Firefox, and Chrome for at least some (hit or miss) translation into other languages. And we hope for proper versions for other cities and in other languages, in whatever ways people are interested in, some time in the future.

For a full discussion of the process of making the map, see our open-access article:

Perlin, Ross, D. Kaufman, M. Turin, M. Daurio, S. Craig, and J. Lampel. 2021. “Mapping Urban Linguistic Diversity in New York City: Motives, Methods, Tools, and Outcomes”, Language Documentation and Conservation. Vol. 15 (2021), pp. 458-490. 

ELA Data

“Languages of New York City” is not based on an ordinary dataset. Instead, it represents ELA’s ongoing effort, since 2010, to draw on all available sources, including thousands of interviews and discussions with community leaders, speakers, and other experts, to tell the continuing story of the city’s many languages and cultures. 

Although the U.S. Census records some information about language, it is too limited to reflect the deep dynamics of migration, diaspora, and cultural change which have driven the history of New York, and which continue to shape other large metropolitan areas. Under a third of the languages mapped here have been identified by the Census Bureau, nor do other reliable data sources exist.

This map is committed to representing in particular the smaller, minority, and Indigenous languages that are primarily oral and have neither public visibility nor official support. By design, the larger languages are underrepesented — so the maximum number of sites allowed for any given language is currently 7. Likewise, many of the city’s varieties of American English, too pervasive to locate precisely, have been left out.

Languages go by many different names — we have tried to use the ones most commonly accepted by speakers and the ones most widely recognized in New York. Read more about these and other choices here.

Languages inherently cannot be pinned down to a map, but move in the mouths of their speakers or in the hands of their signers. There are no universal standards for what makes someone a speaker, a semi-speaker, or heritage speaker. There are particular challenges in representing the multilingualism of individuals — and most New Yorkers speak more than one language — and in mapping multilingual spaces. To represent significant communities, we may include similar but identifiably different varieties, such as Italian English or Dominican Spanish. In other cases, given the limited state of our knowledge, we represent larger groupings, like Mixtec or Fulani, that almost certainly include multiple mutually unintelligible languages. 

The patterns the map reveals — the clustering of West African languages in Harlem and the Bronx, a microcosm of the former Soviet Union in south Brooklyn, the multifaceted Asian-language diversity of Queens, to name a few — only hint at the linguistic complexity of a city where a single building or block can host speakers of dozens of languages from across the globe.

Census Data

Until 1890, when the U.S. Census first asked about language, there was no systematically collected information about the languages spoken in New York or any other American city. From then until 1970, various questions were asked about language use, typically but not always about the “mother tongue” of non-English speakers or the foreign-born. Since the 1970 census, a relatively stable set of questions has been asked—transferred in recent years from the decennial to the more detailed, annual, sample-based American Community Survey (ACS):

• Does this person speak a language other than English at home? (Yes/No)
• What is this language? ________ (For example: Korean, Italian, Spanish, Vietnamese)
• How well does this person speak English (very well, well, not well, not at all)?

The most recent ACS data break out and tabulate data on the language question for just over 100 groups, of which around one-fifth are unclear as to component languages (such as “Other Specified Native American”). Even the most comprehensive ACS accounting, at the level of the metropolitan area, found fewer than 200 languages spoken at home in the New York metropolitan area.

Endangered Language Alliance (ELA) data, presented here, suggests that there are at least three times as many. Census language data for NYC is consistently reliable and recognizable for only approximately 60 languages, according to our estimate, almost all of which are major national languages.

What is the significance of this gap between Census Bureau data and the kind of data collected by linguists and communities working in partnership? We believe that it is not just an issue of looking harder and finding more, but that Indigenous, minority, and primarily oral languages are systematically undercounted for historical reasons, with major implications for those who speak them for several major reasons:

• The languages in which the census itself is administered are majority languages.
• Low self-response rates in areas of high linguistic diversity reflect the justified concerns of many communities about responding to the census at all.
• The way the language question is asked, and the examples provided, do not indicate a serious interest in understanding a community’s full linguistic profile.
• The way responses are tabulated, for reasons connected with privacy and statistical accuracy, tend to obscure smaller languages even when respondents mention them.

In Census panel in the map, we have incorporated language data from the 2016-2020 ACS for purposes of comparison with the ELA data (used everywhere else). ACS data reflects responses to the question on “language spoken at home for the Population 5 Years and Older” and is broken out at the level of the census tract (for the largest languages) and at the PUMA (Public Use Microdata Area) for the others — listed in order of NYC speaker population. We have largely left the data as is, only normalizing some of the names used and removing a few of the most problematic categories. We have done our best to indicate where census data and ELA data can be viewed in conjunction — for instance, where the census has “Mande”, ELA data breaks out over 30 distinct language varieties that fall within Mande.

Contact and Feedback

You can suggest map improvements, corrections, and more in this feedback form, which is also available throughout the site.

How to Help

• Donate so we can keep developing (and get the print version as a gift!)
• Write to us about starting a language map in your city
• If you are a developer and would like to contribute to the project’s code, check out our open issues on GitHub.

Credits

This map comes out of the project Mapping Linguistic Diversity in a Globalizing World through Open Source Digital Tools, a new collaborative partnership between the University of British Columbia and the Endangered Language Alliance.

Core support comes from the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies Wall Solutions Initiative.

The World in the City, which helped enriched the digital map, is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. 

This work has also been made possible in part by Humanities New York.

The original impetus for the map was “Mother Tongues and Queens”, a language map of Queens first published in Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas, edited by Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro and published by University of California Press, in partnership with the Queens Museum and the Queens Library. Elements of the original design are retained and expanded here, with permission.

Special thanks to Molly Roy of M. Roy Cartography, Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, Rebecca Stephen, Zev Mayer, Byambakhuu Darinchuluun (Mongolian Heritage Foundation), Christopher Mulé (Brooklyn Arts Council), Safida Begum, Nawang Gurung, Husniya Khujamyorova, Leobardo Ajtzalam, Ayodapo Osinibi, Simona Bua, John Lechner, Juliette Blevins, Charles Häberl, Peter Golden, Rachel Goshgarian, Savio Meyase, Joseph Salvo, Peter Lobo, John Singler, Suketu Mehta, Daniel Barry, Mahira Tiwana, Nicole Hughes, Tara Purswani, Jessica Holtz, Rose Mintzer-Sweeney, Nick Balamaci, Ian Hancock, Andre Schwab, Matthew Zaslansky, Samuel Owusu-Sekyere, Pete Rushefsky, Abdoulaye Laziz Nchare, Xadim Sylla, Maimouna Dieye, Demarttice Tunstall, Jake Freyer, Rick Chavolla, Thelma Carrillo, Ben Jalloh, Shelley Worrell and Janluk Stanislas of caribBEING, Nicole Galpern, Julia Schillo, Kenneth Bilby, and many others who have helped.

We have also benefitted from feedback from our user community and colleagues.

How to Cite the Map

We recommend that you cite the map or the project as a whole as follows:

Perlin, Ross, Daniel Kaufman, Jason Lampel, Maya Daurio, Mark Turin, Sienna Craig, eds., Languages of New York City (digital version), map. New York: Endangered Language Alliance. (Available online at http://languagemap.nyc, Accessed on 2021-04-15.) 

Specific URLs may be cited as follows:

“Loke” in Ross Perlin, Daniel Kaufman, Jason Lampel, Maya Daurio, Mark Turin, Sienna Craig, eds., Languages of New York City (digital version), map. New York: Endangered Language Alliance. (Available online at https://languagemap.nyc/Explore/Language/Loke, Accessed on 2021-04-15.) 

“Loke (Woodside)” in Ross Perlin, Daniel Kaufman, Jason Lampel, Maya Daurio, Mark Turin, Sienna Craig, eds., Languages of New York City (digital version), map. New York: Endangered Language Alliance. (Available online at https://languagemap.nyc/Explore/Language/Loke/668, Accessed on 2021-04-15.) 

“Woodside” in Ross Perlin, Daniel Kaufman, Jason Lampel, Maya Daurio, Mark Turin, Sienna Craig, eds., Languages of New York City (digital version), map. New York: Endangered Language Alliance. (Available online at https://languagemap.nyc/Explore/Neighborhood/Woodside, Accessed on 2021-04-15.) 

Team

• Ross Perlin, Endangered Language Alliance
• Mark Turin, University of British Columbia
• Maya Daurio, University of British Columbia
• Daniel Kaufman, Queens College and Endangered Language Alliance
• Sienna R. Craig, Dartmouth College
• Matt Malone, Endangered Language Alliance
• Bridget Chase, University of British Columbia

Read more about the team here.

Home Institution

The map grew out of and is maintained by the Endangered Language Alliance, a non-profit dedicated to supporting linguistic diversity in New York City and beyond.

Map Developer

The map programming was done by Jason Lampel at A Better Map.

Map Hosting

This project is kindly supported by Mapbox Community.

Legal

Terms of Use

By using this software you understand and acknowledge the above statement.

Privacy

User location

User location is not stored or used for anything beyond the map functionality.

Data accuracy

To protect the privacy of speakers and to better represent languages on the map, lat/long coordinates have in many cases deliberately been slightly altered in ways that do not in any other way affect the information presented.

License

• Code is under MIT License
• Data is under ODbL License

Sources

Data

The main source of data for the Languages of New York City map is the Endangered Language Alliance (ELA) dataset, downloadable here. All points on the map come from this dataset, which draws on long-term linguist-community collaborations as explained above. Supplementary information about the global status of languages in this dataset comes from Ethnologue (ISO 639-3) and Glottolog.

Census language data, primarily used in the Census section for purposes of comparison with ELA data, is from the most recent (i.e. 2016-2020) data released by the American Community Survey at the US Census Bureau. Likewise the census tracts and PUMA (Public Use Microdata Areas) in which this information is delivered.

The classifying of countries into world regions follows the United Nations Geoscheme.

Only currently recognized nation-states could be included as country names and flags, but this does not represent an endorsement of any political positions or sovereignty claims.

New York City neighborhoods are not official administrative units with formalized boundaries, so no single authoritative schema exists. We used (and slightly modified) the names and boundaries from NYC’s Census 2020 “get out the count” effort, of which ELA was a part. Note that this is not affiliated with the Census Bureau, but is a local effort.

While focused on NYC, the scope of the map does include at least some data for the 31-county metropolitan area (including 26 counties outside NYC) as explained and defined by the Department of City Planning.

Recommended Reads

*The following list, is no way comprehensive, includes some NYC-specific sources ELA has found to be particularly useful in preparing the map*

Bald, Vivek. 2015. Bengali Harlem and the lost histories of South Asian America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Benson, Kathleen, and Philip M. Kayal. 2002. A community of many worlds: Arab Americans in New York City. New York: Museum of the City of New York.

Carver, Edward. 2016. “The Malagasy Underground”, The Brooklyn Rail, September 2016.

Craig, Sienna R. 2020. The ends of kinship: connecting Himalayan lives between Nepal and New York. Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press.

Duany, Jorge and CUNY Dominican Studies Institute. 2008. “Quisqueya on the Hudson: The Transnational Identity of Dominicans in Washington Heights”. CUNY Academic Works.

Edward, Jane Kani, and Mark D. Naison. 2010. White paper on African immigration to the Bronx. Bronx: Fordham University Press.

England, Sarah. 2006. Afro Central Americans in New York City. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

Foner, Nancy. 2000. From Ellis Island to JFK: New York’s Two Great Waves of Immigration. New Haven and New York: Yale University Press and Russell Sage Foundation Press.

Gerharz, Eva and Corinna Land. 2018. Uprooted belonging: the formation of a ‘Jumma Diaspora’ in New York City, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 44:11, 1881-1896.

García, Ofelia, Zeena Zakharia, and Bahar Otcu-Grillman. 2013. Bilingual community education and multilingualism: beyond heritage languages in a global city. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

Garcia, Ofelia and Fishman, Joshua (eds). 2002. The Multilingual Apple: Languages in New York City. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter

Hanson, R. Scott. 2016. City of Gods in Flushing: Religious Freedom, Immigration, and Pluralism , Queens. New York: Fordham University Press.

Jackson, Kenneth T. 2011. The Encyclopedia of New York City. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press.

Juarros-Daussà, Eva. 2013. “Language Transmission Among Catalan and Galician families in New York City”. In Sara Beaudrie and Ana Maria Carvalho. Selected  Proceedings of the 6 th International Workshop on Spanish Sociolinguistics. Somerville,MA: Cascadilla Press. 148-157.

Kane, Ousmane Oumar. 2011. The homeland is the arena: religion, transnationalism, and the integration of Senegalese immigrants in America. New York: Oxford University Press.

Khandelwal, Madhulika. 2002. Becoming American, Being Indian: An Immigrant Community In New York City. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Kizilov, Mikhail. 2009. “The Krymchaks: Current State of the Community” in Mikhail Chlenov et al., Euro-Asian Jewish Yearbook 5768 (2007/2008), Moscow: Pallada.

Kligman, Mark L. 2009. Maqām and liturgy: ritual, music, and aesthetics of Syrian Jews in Brooklyn. Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press.

Laguerre, Michel S. 1984. American odyssey: Haitians in New York City. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Lepore, Jill. 2009. New York burning: liberty, slavery, and conspiracy in eighteenth-century Manhattan. New York: Vintage.

Lowenstein, S. M. (2005). Frankfurt on the Hudson : The German Jewish Community of Washington Heights, 1933-82, Its Structure and Culture. Wayne State University Press.

Mountz, Alison, and Richard A. Wright. 1996. “Daily life in the transnational migrant community of San Agustín, Oaxaca and Poughkeepsie, New York”. Diaspora : a Journal of Transnational Studies.

Nadel, Stanley. 1990. Kleindeutschland (Little Germany): New York City’s Germans, 1845-1880. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.

Nilsen, Kenneth E. “The Irish Language in New York, 1850-1900.” The New York Irish (1996): 252-74.

Pérez, Lisandro. 2018. Sugar, cigars, and revolution: the making of Cuban New York. New York: New York University Press.

Pribilsky, Jason. 2007. La Chulla Vida: Gender, Migration and the Family in Andean Ecuador and New York City. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.

Saed, Zohra. 2013. “Samsa on Sheepshead Bay: Tracing Uzbek Foodprints in Southern Brooklyn” in Robert Ji-Song Ku et al., Eating Asian America: a food studies reader. New York: NYU Press.

Sall, D. (2019). Selective acculturation among low-income second-generation West Africans. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 1-19.

Silverman, Carol. 2014. Romani routes: cultural politics and Balkan music in diaspora. New York: Oxford University Press.

Smith, Robert C. 2006. Mexican New York: transnational lives of new immigrants. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Staub, Shalom. 1989. Yemenis in New York City: the folklore of ethnicity. Philadelphia: Balch Institute Press.

Stoller, Paul. 2010. Money has no smell: the Africanization of New York City. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.

Swanson, Kate. 2018. “From New York to Ecuador and Back Again: Transnational Journeys of Policies and People”. Annals of the American Association of Geographers. 108 (2): 390-398.

Tang, Eric. 2015. Unsettled: Cambodian Refugees in the New York City Hyperghetto. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Weaver C.M., and Kiraz G.A. 2016. “Turoyo Neo-Aramaic in northern New Jersey”. International Journal of the Sociology of Language. 2016 (237): 19-36.

Software

• GitHub project source code (contains full list of open source project dependencies)
• Airtable
• React
• Material UI
• Mapbox GL JS
• TypeScript

Hosting

• All source code is publicly available in the Language Mapping GitHub organization.
• The project is hosted and deployed by Netlify.
• Error monitoring is provided by Sentry.
• Language communities and administrative boundaries are hosted as vector tilesets by Mapbox.

Graphics

• Iconmonstr
• React Icons
• Country flags

Fonts

• Google Noto Fonts were used wherever scripts were not supported by default.

Last updated: December 6, 2022