Language
Brooklyn has a high degree of linguistic diversity. In the 2000 United States Census 46.7% of the population reported speaking a language other than English at home (either exclusively or in addition to English). The most prevalent other language identified was Spanish, spoken at home by 18.00% of the population. Additionally, 5.95% of the population reported speaking Russian, 4.19% Haitian Creole, 3.92% Chinese, 3.10% Yiddish, 2.10% Italian, 1.42% Polish, 1.13% Hebrew, and 1.09% Arabic. Other languages spoken at home by at least 5000 people include Cantonese, Urdu, Bengali, Greek, Korean, Tagalog, and Albanian.
Read more about this topic: Demographics Of Brooklyn
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else.”
—William Hazlitt (1778–1830)
“...I ... believe that words can help us move or keep us paralyzed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something—a great deal—to do with how we live our lives and whom we end up speaking with and hearing; and that we can deflect words, by trivialization, of course, but also by ritualized respect, or we can let them enter our souls and mix with the juices of our minds.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“He never doubts his genius; it is only he and his God in all the world. He uses language sometimes as greatly as Shakespeare; and though there is not much straight grain in him, there is plenty of tough, crooked timber.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)