637 languages spoken in NYC!

[muppet]

Yep in London the White population actually grows thanks to the multitudes arriving in from Europe, the Americas and the Middle East

[muppet]

Being American should be these folk, not to mention Native Americans. Being Black American should be absolutely imbedded as how people view what Americans are, not just now but in the past and part of the fabric of the nation's history throughout.

In short just being Black shouldn't necessarily count as being more diverse for the nation, it should be part and parcel of the nation's canvas. I get the impression Blacks are not counted as 'inherent' to the country or culture despite everyone knowing the history, but still as a sense of 'other'.

[dc_denizen]

I don’t agree. Black Americans are counted as integral to the country by virtue of history, cultural combinations, etc

That doesn’t mean they don’t have their own distinct subculture

American core white culture (“being” white non ethnic American) is really pre civil war , before mass southern and Eastern European immigration started . The culture that produced Hawthorne, Emerson, Melville, Dickinson, Hudson River school paintings, Poe, stonewall Jackson, Lincoln...

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by Capsicum

(it was only within a couple generations earlier when African American culture wasn't even as prominent in American media culture, like say depictions of 50s America, even thoough they were part of the US demographically for centuries, it took some time for things like hip hop to be seen as global American culture or black Americans to be depicted as "regular" American families, gradually over the course of the 60s, 70s, 80s, etc.).

This is a good point, though I do think that African-Americans started to become culturally visible quite a bit before the hip hop era. In spite of the Whitebread America image of the 50s, African-American culture was already starting to carve out its spot in the U.S. consciousness, and by the 1960s with Motown and other entertainers, activists and athletes it started to be fairly well-known in the much of the western world.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by bilbao58

As someone who lived in Thornhill almost 50 years ago I find that...almost shocking. But not really. Toronto had already begun changing by then. And I've seen the same happen in certain suburbs of Houston that I never dared hope would someday be interesting.

Yeah, 50 years is a long time. Quite the transformation has occurred in most areas of Toronto.

It's actually changed a lot even compared to the 80s and 90s when I was a teen/young adult.ç

(Approx.) 150,000 immigrants a year from all around the world will do that.

[bilbao58]

Thought I'd point out that New York is in no way the only polyglot city in the States. From the Center for Immigration Studies:

Almost Half Speak a Foreign Language in America's Largest Cities

"In America's five largest cities, 48 percent of residents now speak a language other than English at home.
In New York City and Houston it is 49 percent; in Los Angeles it is 59 percent; in Chicago it is 36 percent; and in Phoenix it is 38 percent."

https://cis.org/Report/Almost-Half-S...rgest-Cities#1

[Crawford]

Interesting article about a concentration of Seke speakers (an extremely rare Nepalese language) in Flatbush, Brooklyn:

Just 700 Speak This Language (50 in the Same Brooklyn Building)
Seke, one of the world’s rarest languages, is spoken by about 100 people in New York.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/07/n...hki-wakhi.html

The apartment building, in Brooklyn’s Flatbush neighborhood, is a hive of nationalities. A Pakistani woman entered the elevator on a recent afternoon with a big bag of groceries, flicking a dupatta over her shoulder as a Nepalese nurse and the janitor, a man from Jamaica there to mop up a spill, followed her in.

It was hardly an unusual scene in New York, one of the world’s most diverse cities. But this nondescript, seven-story brick building is also the improbable home to some of the last speakers of a rare, unwritten language from Nepal that linguists worry could disappear within a generation, if not sooner.