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.
- 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.