How many languages are spoken at LaGuardia? There is no simple answer.

by Tomonori Nagano


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Picture of Tomonori

Tomonori Nagano

Dr. Tomonori Nagano is an Associate Professor of Japanese and Linguistics, he started teaching at LaGuardia in 2008. Tomonori received his Ph.D. and M.Phil. in Linguistics from the CUNY Graduate Center and his MA in TESOL from New York University. He is currently serving as the coordinator for the Modern Langauges and Literatures Program at LaGuardia Community College.




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How many languages are spoken at LaGuardia? 100? 150? You may have heard figures like these thrown around, but this question is not so easy to answer.

LaGuardia Community College's Institutional Profile 2019 (Lerer, 2019) shows that our students spoke 106 different languages as of 2014 and 98 different languages in 2018. The American Community Survey, a sampled version of the U.S. Census administered every year, asks questions about language in their surveys and their latest data in 2019 indicate that there are over 80 languages and language groups (such as Niger-Congo languages) in the borough of Queens1. Both data sets include largely the same set of major languages in Queens such as Spanish (495,560 or 22.3% according to ACS) , Chinese (142,416 / 6.1%), Korean (39,821 / 2.1%), Bengali (74,462 / 2.7%), Filipino and Tagalog (38,826 / 1.4%), and Russian (34,413 / 1.5%). Just to illustrate this point, I have shown the top 30 languages in Queens (with the ACS data through IPUMS (Ruggles et al., 2018)) and LaGuardia Community College (with the Institutional Research data) in Tables 1 and 2.

Table 1: Top 30 languages spoken in Queens (Amercian Community Survey [1 year]) between 2010-2019
Year 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 Ave. percent
English 891,780 915,494 942,900 947,431 942,773 943,094 972,077 987,375 931,524 934,112 41.0%
Spanish 511,736 503,011 511,276 516,204 518,883 531,021 502,049 516,432 503,156 495,560 22.3%
N/A or blank 131,375 136,749 136,817 141,592 145,257 147,001 142,861 144,061 139,656 134,806 6.1%
Chinese 101,984 124,347 135,368 157,246 151,710 136,210 148,130 160,435 144,190 142,416 6.1%
Korean 59,735 55,039 55,096 45,408 38,118 51,134 46,562 47,058 43,087 39,821 2.1%
Mandarin 59,261 28,412 19,568 23,252 25,933 33,985 40,178 28,818 33,569 39,724 1.5%
Italian 37,033 27,761 24,256 24,802 21,041 21,191 23,143 20,445 20,574 16,058 1.0%
Bengali 36,242 53,535 56,530 63,502 65,860 59,954 65,838 76,374 74,566 74,462 2.7%
French or Haitian Creole 35,633 30,331 33,014 27,915 23,799 26,164 29,504 28,226 23,091 33,648 1.3%
Filipino, Tagalog 34,077 26,652 28,807 27,006 33,867 32,383 33,366 34,048 26,580 38,826 1.4%
Russian 33,895 37,516 35,430 39,900 31,992 41,514 28,225 30,800 32,524 34,413 1.5%
Greek 25,405 31,558 29,688 27,520 28,572 24,424 22,164 22,653 24,157 20,790 1.1%
Polish 22,829 25,981 20,819 22,905 24,502 26,434 29,988 23,487 25,939 25,269 1.1%
Cantonese 22,493 20,470 18,563 18,732 19,786 24,112 26,096 27,195 21,384 26,020 1.0%
Urdu 21,803 19,303 16,602 13,596 24,821 18,349 11,197 13,572 15,196 15,874 0.7%
Panjabi 21,528 23,412 27,756 17,136 29,906 18,446 22,867 23,861 23,356 19,954 1.0%
Hindi 20,409 16,160 17,979 18,544 14,494 29,479 23,428 19,023 20,075 14,541 0.8%
Arabic 15,601 13,621 10,680 14,936 17,001 17,525 15,896 10,075 17,370 12,849 0.6%
French 12,212 14,977 14,402 12,092 12,283 8,189 14,130 10,197 11,670 11,204 0.5%
Hebrew, Israeli 9,807 12,975 8,173 8,273 10,409 8,945 12,961 8,255 9,128 6,349 0.4%
German 7,764 6,243 6,294 6,253 6,233 5,608 4,655 5,514 3,093 4,337 0.2%
Nepali 7,571 6,307 4,355 3,760 6,228 5,900 7,890 8,253 9,654 7,627 0.3%
Rumanian 7,513 8,300 7,905 8,301 9,591 7,471 7,143 6,609 10,412 5,537 0.3%
Kru 6,591 7,892 5,097 5,660 10,170 11,274 0 0 0 0 0.2%
Portuguese 6,389 8,645 6,861 7,382 7,236 6,322 7,642 6,261 8,820 4,530 0.3%
Other Asian languages 6,359 4,816 5,898 6,445 10,154 8,130 378 1,096 982 1,147 0.2%
Croatian 6,258 4,854 3,427 3,527 4,668 4,507 3,959 3,311 3,462 3,139 0.2%
Japanese 5,894 3,498 5,139 5,760 6,678 6,394 5,150 6,102 6,533 4,771 0.2%
Gujarathi 5,545 5,904 7,612 5,730 3,775 5,415 6,138 6,185 4,482 2,270 0.2%
Formosan, Taiwanese 4,653 4,983 2,393 4,740 2,098 3,007 0 0 0 0 0.1%
Malayalam 4,550 2,607 2,308 3,204 4,799 4,155 2,761 3,854 2,735 3,119 0.1%
Others 59,867 65,037 72,204 67,094 69,093 73,008 77,674 78,915 86,791 80,433 3.2%

Table 2: Top 30 languages spoken at LaGuardia Community College between Fall 2016 and Fall 2019 (Those who did not respond to the language question were excluded from the percentage)
Year Fall 2016 Fall 2017 Fall 2018 Fall 2019 Ave. percent
English 5,868 4,392 4,823 3,002 53.9%
Spanish 2,298 1,626 1,775 1,169 20.5%
Chinese 411 364 325 211 3.9%
Bengali 373 295 285 191 3.4%
Nepali 218 258 255 146 2.6%
Arabic 181 149 163 91 1.7%
Korean 130 91 98 49 1.1%
Polish 119 82 73 42 0.9%
Tagalog 114 76 114 75 1.1%
Creole 97 78 91 60 1.0%
Tibetan 96 61 88 58 0.9%
French 89 61 65 32 0.7%
Urdu 73 53 48 32 0.6%
Russian 69 59 62 39 0.7%
Albanian 47 33 41 25 0.4%
Japanese 45 28 24 13 0.3%
Hindi 44 20 24 15 0.3%
Portuguese 39 29 37 31 0.4%
Punjabi 39 29 40 23 0.4%
Greek 38 21 30 23 0.3%
Romanian 37 27 23 10 0.3%
Burmese 34 36 39 26 0.4%
Cantonese 31 0 0 0 0.1%
Ukrainian 28 16 18 12 0.2%
Serbo-Croatian 25 16 18 10 0.2%
Pilipino 24 24 28 14 0.3%
Turkish 21 14 10 0.2%
Uzbek 20 17 20 7 0.2%
Gujarati 18 7 12 8 0.1%
Thai 18 10 12 8 0.1%
Yoruba 15 10 13 5 0.1%
Others (about 70 languages) 258 205 231 148 2.5%
No response 8,529 11,169 10,351 12,947
Total (with responses) 10,917 8,18 8,885 5,586 100.0%

So, can we settle that a slightly more than 100 languages are spoken in Queens and at LaGuardia Community College? The answer is not quite that simple.

Recently a group of linguists working on the preservation of less common languages has proposed that many more languages are spoken in New York City than previously recorded. Daniel Kaufman and Ross Perlin at Endangered Language Alliance (https://elalliance.org) argue that a large number of indigenous and endangered languages (languages spoken by so few people that they may not be transmitted to the following generation) exist in New York City2. According to their measure, there are over 800 languages in New York City and many of them are found in Queens, the most linguistically diverse borough among the five boroughs.

In order to understand this wide gap in the estimated numbers of languages, we need to visit the basic concept of “language” and a fundamental question of what makes one version human communicative code a language rather than a dialect (or vice versa).

A Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich once said “A language is a dialect with an army and navy” to illustrates the conventional perception about languages. For many people, language is a sociopolitical construct, which is inherently rooted in the imperialistic, nation-state ideology of human civilization. In other words, a language has strong affiliation with the identity of a nation state and, therefore, its boundary with another language largely overlaps the national or regional boundary. Consider the so-called Chinese language, which serves as a good example of this imperialistic notion of language. The Chinese language is, in reality, a group of a large number of dialects/languages, many of which are not mutually intelligible. The idea of the Chinese language as a single language is widely accepted and the Chinese language is sometimes considered as synonymous to Mandarin. However, the idea of Mandarin as the national language of China dismisses other major dialects/languages such as Cantonese (spoken by over 60 million speakers), Shanhainese (over 70 million speakers), and Taiwanese (over 15 million speakers).

Also, this conventional notion of language often entails linguistic codification, a process of standardizing language varieties by selecting “correct” use of a language from other “incorrect” usages. The prescribed and standardized orthography, vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciations are considered as essential for a language, which consequently dismisses many languages without standardized written forms.

Linguists often employ a less-common but more linguistically oriented approach called “mutual intelligibility” to identify languages among different human communication codes. If two speakers use different varieties of communication code and if they do not understand each other (i.e., lack mutual intelligibility), these two communication codes are considered to be two independent languages. If the two speakers sufficiently understand each other (i.e., having mutual intelligibility), these two communication codes are considered as two dialects of one language. Mutual intelligibility is usually established in oral language and it is a convenient measure for a large number of languages/dialects that lack any standardized written language tradition, which would be otherwise remain unrecognized as languages in the conventional sociopolitical definition of language.

All in all, linguists use a combination of sociopolitical considerations and mutual intelligibility in order to define languages. For example, Ethnologue (https://www.ethnologue.com), the most comprehensive database of languages, identify 7,117 languages in the world (Eberhard, Simons, & Fennig, 2020). International Organization for Standardization (ISO)'s latest language codes (ISO 639-3; https://iso639-3.sil.org) has 7,968 entries for human languages.

One example in this comprehensive catalog of languages is Mamuju, a language spoken in the Sulawesi province of Indonesia. It is estimated that there are about 62,900 speakers of Mamuju. According to Ethnologue , Mamuju is considered a threatened language since native speakers of Mamuju are not actively transmitting this linguistic heritage to the next generation of the community. Many speakers of Mamuju more frequently use Mandar and Indonesian, two dominant languages of the region and the country. It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to locate an active speaker of Mamuju even in Indonesia.

Mamuju, a dying language in a remote area in Southeast Asia, was one of the least recognized languages in New York City – until Daniel Kaufman of Endangered Language Alliance unexpectedly met Husni Husain, a native speaker of Mamuju, at his friend’s wedding party in New York City (Roberts, 2010). Husni had lived in the U.S. for several decades by then, but he had not been using his native tongue. Neither his wife nor his children used Mamuju. Husni is probably the only speaker of Mamuju in New York City and he is contributing this rare language to the linguistic diversity of Queens – by himself.

So, how many languages are spoken at LaGuardia? Maybe the answer to this question depends on one of your classmates who secretly speaks an extremely rare and underrecognized language.



References and Footnotes

1The U.S. Census Bureau has recently developed a new web-based interface for analyzing the census data. The URL is https://data.census.gov/cedsci/.

2See various articles featuring their language preservation effort in the New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/29/nyregion/29lost.html), New Yorker (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/30/a-loss-for-words), Aljazeera (https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2010/05/17/dying-languages-living-in-new-york/), and BBC (https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20716344)

Eberhard, D. M., Simons, G. F., & Fennig, C. D. (2020). Ethnologue: Languages of the world (23rd ed.). Dallas, Texas: SIL International.

Lerer, N. (2019). Laguardia Community College institutional profile 2019 (Tech. Rep.). New York, NY: Office of Institutional Research & Assessment, LaGuardia Community College.

Roberts, S. (2010). The lost languages, found in New York. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/29/nyregion/29lost.html

Ruggles, S., Flood, S., Goeken, R., Grover, J., Meyer, E., Pacas, J., & Sobek, M. (2018). IPUMS USA: Version 8.0 [dataset]. Minneapolis, MN: IPUMS. (https://doi.org/10.18128/D010.V8.0)