The 3 most commonly spoken languages in every New York City neighborhood

Advertisement
The 3 most commonly spoken languages in every New York City neighborhood

New York City Marathon

Reuters//Lucas Jackson

The first wave of runners make their way across the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge during the start of the New York City Marathon.

Advertisement
  • New York City includes dozens of neighborhoods across its five boroughs: Brooklyn, Manhattan, Staten Island, Queens, and the Bronx.
  • Those neighborhoods draws people from around the world, and a plethora of languages are spoken by residents.
  • Using Census data from the Minnesota Population Center, we found the three most commonly spoken languages in each NYC neighborhood.

People from all over the world come to live and work in New York City, and that shows up in the wide variety of languages spoken in the city.

The Census Bureau's American Community Survey provides a picture of several demographic, economic, and social characteristics of the US population. One of the questions on the survey asks respondents what language they mainly speak at home. Using data from the Minnesota Population Center's 2011-2015 ACS Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, we found the top three languages spoken in each New York City neighborhood.

For our working definition of neighborhood, we used the Census Bureau's Public Use Microdata Areas, which are designed to allow small-scale geographic analyses of individual-level ACS data. In New York City, these areas mostly correspond to the city's community districts, or groups of two community districts for areas with smaller populations, and so are a pretty good proxy for neighborhoods.

Here are the three most common languages spoken at home in each NYC neighborhood.

Advertisement
{{}}

The most commonly spoken language in most neighborhoods is English.

The most commonly spoken language in most neighborhoods is English.

Several neighborhoods in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and northern Manhattan and Queens have Spanish as the most common language spoken at home. Brooklyn Community District 13, covering Brighton Beach and Coney Island, has Russian as its most common language.

The second most commonly spoken language in most neighborhoods is Spanish.

The second most commonly spoken language in most neighborhoods is Spanish.

Several neighborhoods in Queens and Brooklyn have other languages falling in the second-place spot.

Advertisement

Here's a closeup of Brooklyn and Queens, highlighting some of the second most common languages that aren't English or Spanish.

Here's a closeup of Brooklyn and Queens, highlighting some of the second most common languages that aren't English or Spanish.

Pockets of Chinese and Russian show up as second most common languages, and Haitian or French Creole (marked as "Creole" on the map) is common in a large swath of east Brooklyn.

In most neighborhoods, neither English nor Spanish is the third most commonly spoken language.

In most neighborhoods, neither English nor Spanish is the third most commonly spoken language.

In the next slides, we'll take a closer look at each of the city's boroughs.

Advertisement

Here's the third most commonly spoken language in each neighborhood in Manhattan and the Bronx.

Here's the third most commonly spoken language in each neighborhood in Manhattan and the Bronx.

Chinese and French are common in Manhattan, while the languages from the African Kru language family are the third most common in several Bronx neighborhoods.

Here's the third most common language in each Brooklyn and Queens neighborhood.

Here's the third most common language in each Brooklyn and Queens neighborhood.

A wide mix of languages show up in these two boroughs.

Advertisement

And here's the third most common language in each neighborhood in Staten Island.

And here's the third most common language in each neighborhood in Staten Island.
Next StoryI've traveled to 25 countries and everyone wanted to ask - or tell - me the same things about the US