Languages of NYC

November 1, 2016 1:49 PM

Interactive Map Shows What Languages NYers Speak At Home

New York City neighborhoods where the most common language spoken at home isn't English stand out on web developer and designer Jill Hubley's latest census map like islands: deep blue Spanish in Sunset Park; mint green Yiddish in Hasidic Williamsburg and a portion of Crown Heights; fuchsia Russian in Brighton Beach.

The fullscreen version of the map tool is here on the designer's website.

posted by poffin boffin (33 comments total)

Can't speak for anywhere else but this is relative accurate for (geographic) south Brooklyn.
posted by griphus at 1:59 PM on November 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

i wish it would've gone more in depth wrt the african languages, and pretty much all the other languages that were grouped together for the sake of a neat key. "other asian languages"? there's literally 12 zillion just in china, come on. give me every last bit of information, dammit.
posted by poffin boffin at 2:06 PM on November 1, 2016 [6 favorites]

Also, I had no idea so many families speak Hebrew as the primary language at home (I assume all the Hebrew blocks aren't just from Israelis?)
posted by griphus at 2:07 PM on November 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

Surprising that Vietnamese is such a big thing in Central Park.
posted by Herr Zebrurka at 2:08 PM on November 1, 2016 [8 favorites]

The Central Park census tract is always a head-scratcher for me-- dug up this article from 2011. At least now we know the most common language there is Spanish, followed by Vietnamese.
posted by supercres at 2:09 PM on November 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

I'm curious about all the French and French Creole. Are there that many Haitians in NY? It's also interesting seeing the interaction of French, French Creole, and "other African languages" - I'd guess that a significant proportion are Francophone Africans?
posted by ChuraChura at 2:16 PM on November 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

poffin boffin, the article touches on that: it's from the data used, not for the sake of the key.

The web version uses the United State Census Bureau's American Community Survey, hence the somewhat random application of specificity (we get Thai, Urdu and Laotian, then "Other Asian Languages" and "Other Pacific Island Languages" and the maddeningly broad "African Languages").
posted by Itaxpica at 2:17 PM on November 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

I'm curious about all the French and French Creole. Are there that many Haitians in NY?

Yep, enough so that it's one of the languages that official MTA announcement posters are printed in (along with English, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, and Korean).

Here's an example
posted by Itaxpica at 2:21 PM on November 1, 2016 [7 favorites]

Are there that many Haitians in NY?

Yes.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 2:23 PM on November 1, 2016 [4 favorites]

yeah i'm pretty sure nyc has the most haitians anywhere in the US?

oh on preview yes there is a wiki cite
posted by poffin boffin at 2:28 PM on November 1, 2016

Also, I had no idea so many families speak Hebrew as the primary language at home (I assume all the Hebrew blocks aren't just from Israelis?)

I'm guessing that they are predominantly Orthodox Jews.
posted by Splunge at 2:33 PM on November 1, 2016

Poffin boffin - Florida May have as many or more creole speakers than NYC.
posted by jonmc at 2:36 PM on November 1, 2016

I'm guessing that they are predominantly Orthodox Jews.

ashkenazim would be more likely to speak yiddish at home though. i guess they could be persian or mizrahim? but ime they're more likely to speak their native language at home as opposed to hebrew. really the only jews i know who speak hebrew at home are israelis. it's mostly a liturgical language for the rest of us, not an everyday language.
posted by poffin boffin at 2:38 PM on November 1, 2016 [10 favorites]

yeah i'm pretty sure nyc has the most haitians anywhere in the US?

More than Miami. Wow.
posted by indubitable at 3:03 PM on November 1, 2016

This is very cool.
posted by rtha at 3:11 PM on November 1, 2016

Also, I had no idea so many families speak Hebrew as the primary language at home (I assume all the Hebrew blocks aren't just from Israelis?)

I'm assuming that either a lot of the Hebrew blocks don't have a lot of people who speak a language other than English or Spanish or that they have such a diverse array of non-English, non-Spanish languages that the most common language doesn't have to have that many speakers. Also, there are a fair number of Israelis in New York.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 3:17 PM on November 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

also that east side bloc of hebrew in manhattan just below the end of roosevelt island directly correlates to the location of nyc's israeli consulate.
posted by poffin boffin at 3:22 PM on November 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

I'm assuming that either a lot of the Hebrew blocks don't have a lot of people who speak a language other than English or Spanish or that they have such a diverse array of non-English, non-Spanish languages that the most common language doesn't have to have that many speakers.

Yes, I think this is the case. Like, Randall's Island shows up as being Yiddish-speaking. But most of Randall's Island is made up of parks; it has a population of 1,648 (as of 2010); the population that doesn't speak English or Spanish at home may be one elderly couple who swear at each other in Yiddish all day long.
posted by Joe in Australia at 3:25 PM on November 1, 2016 [8 favorites]

I studied borscht red Yiddish only to discover when I moved to NYC that everyone spoke mint green Yiddish. Feh.
posted by languagehat at 4:58 PM on November 1, 2016 [7 favorites]

I don't see Esperanto :(
posted by grobertson at 5:54 PM on November 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

The Central Park census tract is always a head-scratcher for me-- dug up this article from 2011.

Huh. So the population of Central Park residents is entirely self-reported, and makes up 0.0003% of New York City. 4% of the population believe “lizard people” control our societies by gaining political power, but ten thousand times fewer people are willing to claim to live in Central Park. Because that would just be crazy.
posted by roystgnr at 6:08 PM on November 1, 2016

Or Estonian. Or anything else less common.
posted by Vaike at 6:10 PM on November 1, 2016

Italian-American-NY. Unique to NY, but odd and different. But, no mention. :-(

rigott, ricotta, for example
posted by pjmoy at 6:18 PM on November 1, 2016

The UES and West Village French contingent is interesting, I'm guessing those are "expat" French business people?
posted by pravit at 7:35 PM on November 1, 2016

Nah, they're just super pretentious.
posted by Exceptional_Hubris at 9:01 PM on November 1, 2016

"Other West Germanic languages" shows one small speck. Since English, German and Yiddish are labelled separately this leaves Dutch, Scots and Letsembürgisch.
Is that a tiny Dutch enclave? Intrigueing.
posted by jouke at 10:15 PM on November 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

Letsembürgisch = Luxemburgish?
posted by Joe in Australia at 12:25 AM on November 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

I'd guess that a significant proportion are Francophone Africans?

Your guess is correct (map of French throughout the world).

I'm guessing those are "expat" French business people?

Your guess is likely correct too. This however is based entirely on my anecdotal knowledge of French expats in NYC.

Love seeing maps like these!
posted by fraula at 3:57 AM on November 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

I am reminded of this classic New Yorker cover from 2001
posted by briank at 4:53 AM on November 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

"other indic languages" on my blocks, which I'm going to assume is Bengali, because it's the third most common language spoken at my daughter's school.
posted by gaspode at 6:53 AM on November 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

Joe in AU: yes. It's the national language of Luxemburg. Sounds a lot like German actually.
posted by jouke at 8:23 AM on November 2, 2016

I enjoy seeing the Haitian Creole signs on the NYC subway. I have halfway decent French and it's always fun to compare the Creole text to what the French text would presumably be, based on my translating from the original English; it's gratifying to catch things like pwochan estasyon (the spelling may be off, I'm eyeballing it from Itaxpica's picture) for "next station" (French: prochaine station).
posted by andrewesque at 9:22 AM on November 2, 2016

yeah, the non-african aspects of kreyol vocab look unusual to a francophone's eye but it's often just phonetic (and often archaic) french. kreyol was a purely spoken language for hundreds of years and iirc even now writing styles are still a point of debate.
posted by poffin boffin at 11:35 AM on November 2, 2016