NYC Map
Print NYC language maps available for a $50 donation, or both the NYC map and an ELA t-shirt for $70.
Donate via Facebook, Paypal, or by mail.
Check out the freely available interactive digital version of the map at languagemap.nyc, created in partnership with the University of British Columbia and with support from the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies. Your donation helps us continue development.
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.
See below for details on how to obtain a map and support ELA’s work.
The print NYC Languages Map is 24″ x 36″, full-color, standard frame size, with map purchases going to support linguistic diversity.
Unfortunately our earlier Queens language map is now SOLD OUT.
There are three ways to donate and receive the NYC print map — click the Donate button on our Facebook page, donate via Paypal, or send a check made out to Endangered Language Alliance to 3 W 18th St, 6th Fl, NY NY 10011.
Please send your mailing address to info@elalliance.org to receive your map. *Add $20 for shipping outside the US*
If you donate $50, you’ll get the full NYC map.
If you donate $70, you’ll get the map plus an ELA t-shirt showing I Love NY in all the possible sentence orders in the languages of the world. Just let us know your size!
(Digital PDF above courtesy of Noah Veltman)
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in Partnership with the City Council.
