Language Map of New York City

NYC language maps supporting ELA’s work, with ~700 language varieties (and counting) mapped to over 1200 significant sites, are available for a $50 donation.

The print NYC Languages Map is 24″ x 36″, full-color, standard frame size, with map purchases going to support ELA’s work.

The New York metropolitan area is the most linguistically diverse urban center in the world, probably in the history of the world.

Based on a decade of work, ELA has mapped 700-plus language varieties (and counting) to over 1200 significant sites around the metropolitan area, including neighborhoods, community institutions, restaurants, and other locations where there is, or was, at least one speaker. We believe this is the first detailed linguist-produced map of the city. We released the print map of the entire city in December 2019 — covered in Time Out, Gothamist, and elsewhere, and noted in the New York Times — to coincide with the UN-delcared International Year of Indigenous Languages and the lead-up to the critical U.S. 2020 census.

ELA is committed to representing many of the smaller, minority, and Indigenous languages that are primarily oral and have neither public visibility nor official support. It represents ELA’s ongoing effort to draw on all available sources, including thousands of interviews and discussions, to tell the continuing story of the city’s many languages and cultures. The patterns it 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.