New York City Is An Extremely Cosmopolitan Place, and walking around the city, one often hears a plethora of languages being spoken.
The American Community Survey is a massive annual effort by the Census Bureau to measure various aspects of American life. Among many other things, respondents are asked if they speak a language other than English at home, and if so, what language is spoken. Using this data, as explained in more detail at the bottom of this post, Business Insider was able to map out New York City’s most popular non-English languages.
First, here’s the most commonly spoken non-English language in each NYC community district. Unsurprisingly, Spanish is pretty dominant. There are quite a few Chinese speakers in the southern Brooklyn neighborhoods of Bensonhurst and Bay Ridge, and in Flushing, Queens, and a few other language enclaves scattered around the city.
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Because Spanish shows up in so many neighborhoods, we made an alternate version of the map where we found the most common non-English, non-Spanish language:
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The maps were made using the ACS Public Use Microdata Sample, an edited version of the individual responses to the survey. With this data, we were able to calculate the most commonly spoken non-English language in each of New York City’s Census-designated “Public Use Microdata Areas,” which closely conform to the city government’s community districts, for which the city provides very nice-looking map outlines.