There are 637 Languages in NYC ...

There are 8 million (more like 8.6 million) stories in this city -- so it's probably not surprising that many different languages are spoken here. But it surprised even a supposedly jaded, sophisticated New Yorker like myself that there are over 630 languages spoken within the five boroughs -- more languages than there are countries on Earth.

But it's one thing to read that there are approximately 637 languages spoken in NYC but it's another thing to see where in NYC they are spoken.

And now you can! 

An organization called the Endangered Language Alliance recently published a map that shows exactly where in NYC these six-hundred-something languages are spoken -- over 1000 locations in all. It's a scannable, zoomable PDF map so you can really drill down into different boroughs and neighborhoods to see where these langauges -- some you've probably never heard of like Chavacano in Queens or Hausa in Brooklyn -- are spoken, probably right next door to you. 

Just another amazing fact about this amazing town!

NYC Cacophony: The Voices that Command Us

When you have a city of more than 8.5 million people, you're going to have a lot of different voices speaking in a lot of different languages. (In fact there are 637 languages spoken in NYC, as blogged about here). Anywho, for all the different tongues and babble that occurs simultaneously every day in this town, very few voices get the honor of being amplified above the din, of being given the chance to rise and communicate with the rest of the city.

Those voices are the few, the happy few.

Some of these chosen voices are obvious: politicians get a big public voice, as do radio and TV broadcasters, as well as rich and famous and notable people around town. They get the honor and the rare chance to talk directly to us, to share their ideas and opinions to the rest of us, to influence how this town thinks and feels about things, to permeate the consciousness of the city.

A few offbeat exampples:

It was just announced by the MTA that a variety of NYC celebrities like Jerry Seinfeld, Whoopi Goldberg, Awkwafina, even Judakiss (!) and several others will start making the routine announcements you hear on the subways and buses every day -- but with a funky, distinct, NYC personality-driven twist. This is a big, new, fun project to lighten up and uplift the citizens of NYC as they commute from place to place. These are a bunch of creative NYC voices that will be telling us to do routine things like watch our step, stand clear of the closing doors, socially distance, etc. 

Then there are the politicians: did you know that NYC has a cable channel and livestream devoted to the City Council? You can watch Councilmembers speak on the floor of the Council at City Hall or watch their hearings all day, every day. These are the voices that make the laws that we all live under, the voices that decide how much and on what the city's monies get spent. These are the real voices that command us -- and, if you so choose, you can listen in.

But not all the voices that command us do so to tell us what to do or what they are going to do to us. Sometimes the voices that command us do so by moving our spirit, inspiring our souls. For example, Allison Steele, the late great briliant radio DJ that I've blogged about several times. You can just go and listen to some of her old clips, from back in the days when she ruled the overnight NYC airwaves, and her gorgeous voices married to her kind words and gentle messages, forced people, in a good way, to feel better about themselves and their fellow human beings. Now that is a part of the NYC cacophony that we should cherish, always and forever. 

These are but a very select few examples of the NYC cacophony, the voices that command us but that can also inform, help, educate, and sometimes even soothe us.

Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, "Perchance to dream." In NYC there is no greater honor than "Perchance to speak, perchance to be heard."

P.S. I'm not really using the word "cacophony" correctly here (it means a mixture of harsh, discordant sounds) but it's one of those fancy sounding SAT words that I learned in days of yore so I'm shamelessly using it here. 

The Speech of His Mayoralty

That Mayor Bloomberg is one tricky SOB. He does one thing after another that annoys me (just read this blog) and that means I bust his balls on here on a pretty regular basis. Then he turns around and gives the most impassioned, sensitive, and amazing speech of his career -- a profound calling for religious tolerance. Wow.

NYC's mayors are not necessarily known as great speechgivers and, in his 8 1/2 years as mayor, our Mike has rarely said anything particularly memorable. But this speech was. Read it here:

“We've come here to Governors Island to stand where the earliest settlers first set foot in New Amsterdam, and where the seeds of religious tolerance were first planted. We come here to see the inspiring symbol of liberty that more than 250 years later would greet millions of immigrants in this harbor. And we come here to state as strongly as ever, this is the freest city in the world. That's what makes New York special and different and strong.

“Our doors are open to everyone. Everyone with a dream and a willingness to work hard and play by the rules. New York City was built by immigrants, and it's sustained by immigrants -- by people from more than 100 different countries speaking more than 200 different languages and professing every faith. And whether your parents were born here or you came here yesterday, you are a New Yorker.

“We may not always agree with every one of our neighbors. That's life. And it's part of living in such a diverse and dense city. But we also recognize that part of being a New Yorker is living with your neighbors in mutual respect and tolerance. It was exactly that spirit of openness and acceptance that was attacked on 9/11, 2001.

“On that day, 3,000 people were killed because some murderous fanatics didn't want us to enjoy the freedoms to profess our own faiths, to speak our own minds, to follow our own dreams, and to live our own lives. Of all our precious freedoms, the most important may be the freedom to worship as we wish. And it is a freedom that even here -- in a city that is rooted in Dutch tolerance -- was hard-won over many years.

“In the mid-1650s, the small Jewish community living in lower Manhattan petitioned Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant for the right to build a synagogue, and they were turned down. In 1657, when Stuyvesant also prohibited Quakers from holding meetings, a group of non-Quakers in Queens signed the Flushing Remonstrance, a petition in defense of the right of Quakers and others to freely practice their religion. It was perhaps the first formal political petition for religious freedom in the American colonies, and the organizer was thrown in jail and then banished from New Amsterdam.

“In the 1700s, even as religious freedom took hold in America, Catholics in New York were effectively prohibited from practicing their religion, and priests could be arrested. Largely as a result, the first Catholic parish in New York City was not established until the 1780s, St. Peter's on Barclay Street, which still stands just one block north of the World Trade Center site, and one block south of the proposed mosque and community center.

“This morning, the city's Landmark Preservation Commission unanimously voted to extend -- not to extend -- landmark status to the building on Park Place where the mosque and community center are planned. The decision was based solely on the fact that there was little architectural significance to the building. But with or without landmark designation, there is nothing in the law that would prevent the owners from opening a mosque within the existing building.

“The simple fact is, this building is private property, and the owners have a right to use the building as a house of worship, and the government has no right whatsoever to deny that right. And if it were tried, the courts would almost certainly strike it down as a violation of the U.S. Constitution.

“Whatever you may think of the proposed mosque and community center, lost in the heat of the debate has been a basic question: Should government attempt to deny private citizens the right to build a house of worship on private property based on their particular religion? That may happen in other countries, but we should never allow it to happen here.

“This nation was founded on the principle that the government must never choose between religions or favor one over another. The World Trade Center site will forever hold a special place in our city, in our hearts. But we would be untrue to the best part of ourselves and who we are as New Yorkers and Americans if we said no to a mosque in lower Manhattan.

“Let us not forget that Muslims were among those murdered on 9/11, and that our Muslim neighbors grieved with us as New Yorkers and as Americans. We would betray our values and play into our enemies' hands if we were to treat Muslims differently than anyone else. In fact, to cave to popular sentiment would be to hand a victory to the terrorists, and we should not stand for that.

"For that reason, I believe that this is an important test of the separation of church and state as we may see in our lifetimes, as important a test. And it is critically important that we get it right.

"On Sept. 11, 2001, thousands of first responders heroically rushed to the scene and saved tens of thousands of lives. More than 400 of those first responders did not make it out alive. In rushing into those burning buildings, not one of them asked, 'What God do you pray to?' (Bloomberg's voice cracks here a little as he gets choked up.) 'What beliefs do you hold?'

"The attack was an act of war, and our first responders defended not only our city, but our country and our constitution. We do not honor their lives by denying the very constitutional rights they died protecting. We honor their lives by defending those rights and the freedoms that the terrorists attacked.

"Of course, it is fair to ask the organizers of the mosque to show some special sensitivity to the situation, and in fact their plan envisions reaching beyond their walls and building an interfaith community. But doing so, it is my hope that the mosque will help to bring our city even closer together, and help repudiate the false and repugnant idea that the attacks of 9/11 were in any ways consistent with Islam.

"Muslims are as much a part of our city and our country as the people of any faith. And they are as welcome to worship in lower Manhattan as any other group. In fact, they have been worshipping at the site for better, the better part of a year, as is their right. The local community board in lower Manhattan voted overwhelmingly to support the proposal. And if it moves forward, I expect the community center and mosque will add to the life and vitality of the neighborhood and the entire city.

"Political controversies come and go, but our values and our traditions endure, and there is no neighborhood in this city that is off-limits to God's love and mercy, as the religious leaders here with us can attest."

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/dailypolitics/2010/08/bloomberg-stands-up-for-mosque.html#ixzz0vg8bMZMo

Remember, it's Chinatown

One of the greatest movies ever made is Chinatown, the 1974 crime thriller about the corrupt  political machinations that built Los Angeles. Funnily enough, the actual neighborhood of Chinatown appears only once at the very end of the movie. But, as it proves, Chinatown the place isn't as important as Chinatown the idea -- the idea of foreignness, mystery, scandal, and excitement. It's a ready made place for the movies, a cinematic treasure trove.

Chinatown, like any and all foreign language urban enclaves (think Greeks in Astoria, Russians in Brighton Beach, Orthodox Jews in Borough Park, Italians in Little Italy) is like a little world within a world, a satellite of the country its residents come from. The people there live insular lives, their families and communities are more important to them than the city as a whole, and they operate by their own rules, dictated more by their home country's customs and traditions then by their new country's laws. They speak their native language, the signs for their stores are in those languages' alphabets, and they read newspapers, watch TVs show, and listen to radio programs about their home counties.  

And woe unto those outsiders who dare intrude and seek to change them! These neighborhoods live in perpetual conflict with the outside (i.e. mostly white and English-speaking) world. Sometimes these two worlds come into conflict -- and drama obviously ensures. As mentioned, this makes great material for the movies.     

No movie as great as Chinatown has been made about NYC's own Chinatown but, over the years, several movies have been set in that little area of Lower Manhattan. Until Monday, at the Metrograph on Ludlow Street, several New York Chinatown movies will be playing in a festival called Imaginary Chinatown. Some of them, as this article indicates, perpetuate ugly racist stereotypes of Chinese people and that shouldn't be ignored. But what's interesting about these movies is how when outsiders (i.e. white people) go into Chinatown, they are entering a new world within their own city, a world they don't understand, and a world where they don't rule. For most, it's a rude awakening, and their arrogance, their sense of superiority, is quickly extinguished. 

My favorite NYC Chinatown movie is the 1985 Michael Cimino flick The Year of the Dragon. It's a fun, pulpy, violent movie starring Mickey Rourke as an NYPD detective trying to take down a Chinatown drug gang and the great John Lone as his arch-nemesis. It's dives deep into the culture of Chinatown and it explains, as few other Chinatown movies do, that this a world few white people and outsiders will ever understand. 

And that's, ultimately, what it's all about: understanding. Understanding the "other", the mysteries in our midst. The classic line "Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown" is all about how people who meddle in places they don't understand are headed to certain ruin. So before you go into Chinatown or any other place and try to change it, either understand it first -- or forget it.   

International NYC Redux

A few years ago, my family and I visited China. Shortly after blogging about that trip, I blogged about the interconnected global village we all live. When you visit a KFC in the Beijing airport, you realize the world has indeed shrunk.

The world is big and small at the same time. Or flat, as others have called it. 

Living in NYC, you are acutely aware of living in the capital of the world. We are not just a great American city, we are not only an international city like London or Tokyo, we are the capital of the world because this is where the world comes together.

This is the home of Ellis Island and the United Nations. This is a city with whole neighborhoods defined by the nationalities that populate them (Little Italy, two Chinatowns, Koreans in Flushing, Greeks in Astoria, Russians in Brighton Beach, Orthodox Jews in Williamsburg, and on and on). This is where the Statue of Liberty sits, a symbol not only of our nation's liberty but a beacon to the world -- Lady Liberty, that Mother of Exiles, calling the poor, tired huddled masses from Ancient lands yearning to be free.

As much as I write about NYC on this blog, I also like to write about wherever I travel to in the USA and the world. So far I've traveled to, and blogged about, China, Venice, Paris, London, Portland, New Orleans, and Kansas City. I've also blogged about the various exhibits at the Met that have an international flavor. And the neighborhood I live in, Astoria, is not only the Greek capital of NYC but also the Egyptian capital of NYC -- and the Arab Spring has not only taken place in Cairo and Libya and Tunisia but also on Steinway Street. 

NYC is the world.

And learning more about the world is always fascinating. 

Increasing, like a lot of Americans, I've gotten sick of watching the TV news because so much of it is dumb and cynical. Also, American news poorly covers the world. But if you live in NYC (and have cable), you not only live in the capital of the world but the world can literally come into your living room. On our cable system, we have some of the best international cable channels available. Now a lot of them are in other languages but several of the best ones are in English. Specifically, CNN International, Al Jazeera English, Russian Today, and CCTV (the Chinese English service). Also, you can find BBC World News on most PBS stations. 

If you want to find these channels on your dial, go to the Time Warner website or flip around on the remote.


The quality of the reporting on these international stations is vastly superior to regular network and cable news. You learn so much about the world in which we live that you feel much smarter after watching it. And when you live in NYC, the capital of the world, it's great to have these international cable channels to compliment this international city.