Design
The Ultimate Map of New York's Non-English Languages
From the French-creole communities in Brooklyn to the Laotian enclave in the Bronx.
If you want to hear someone speaking Persian in New York, try hanging around southeast Manhattan’s Peter Cooper Village. If Urdu’s more your thing, head to the neighborhoods around Forest Park in Queens, and for Tagalog and Serbo-Croatian visit Washington Heights and Astoria, respectively.
That’s the lay of the linguistic land according to Jill Hubley, a Brooklyn web developer who’s mapped New York’s tree species and toxic spills. Hubley’s latest project is a breakdown of the city’s languages, ranging from the tongues of African nations to Korean to Yiddish. Although you can include English (light blue) and Spanish (dark blue) in the count, it makes things looks a little boring: