Kuchin or Gwich'in or Kutchhi?

A language data mystery

The Bronx has incredible linguistic diversity. About 57 percent of people over age 5 told the American Community Survey in 2021 that they speak a language other than English at home. Of course, by far the largest group reports some version of Spanish as the home language (81 percent of the non-English group). But beyond that there are a huge number of other languages. Institutional Research at Lehman told me that our students report 96 different home languages.

Over my years at Lehman, I have seen this change. The war in Kosovo brought many Albanian speakers to the Bronx, waves of migration from various countries in Africa have brought Kru, Ibo, andYoruba among many other languages. These days Bengali is the second largest language group of students and in the borough, roughly tied with French (mainly from the French Caribbean).

This spring I wrote a survey about multilingualism at Lehman, and I read quite a lot about how to ask people what languages they speak in a way that encourages them to report all of them. What was fascinating was how clear experienced people were that you cannot ask this as an open ended question. Essentially, experience has taught researchers that it is more or less impossible to accurately clean open ended data. So in my survey I gave people a list of about 100 languages (the IR list plus some we teach or that I was aware of, such as Irish). I still left some spaces to fill in “other languages” and got a good number of new ones including:

Assamese, Basque, Bhojpuri, Catalan, Danish, Ebonics, Egyptian, Esperanto, Ga, Garifuna, Guarani, Guyanese Creole, Haitian Kreole, Jamaican, Kapampangan (Pampango), Kurdish, Lala, Latvian, Malagasy, Mixteco, Na, Nahuatl, Namwanga, Nyanja, Patois, Patois - Various Caribbean English Dialects, Patois (Dialect), Portuguese, Potwa, Quechua, Swedish, Taishaness( a Dialect in China ), Tonga, Turkish, Wolof, Yiddish

My bad about some of these (and some were actually on the list, but with 100 it can be easy to miss). One student said “Bronx (It’s a Language of Its Own)”, and I say: fair enough. But it did make me realize why cleaning a straight open ended question on language would have been hard and required a lot of manual recoding. Doing that at large scale would be very hard. Turns out that the Census uses an open-ended question in the American Community Survey; that is a huge undertaking.

No one in our Lehman sample seems to have reported that they speak Kuchin. This is interesting to me because while not a common language in the Bronx, the ACS did estimate that there were 130 speakers in the Bronx (back in 2009-13). Newer data from the Public Use Micro Sample (PUMS) in 2021 doesn’t record Kuchin as a stand alone language but it still estimates 126 speakers of “Other Native North American Languages'“ with no further detail. ¹

I thought this was so interesting and wondered about it. The first think I found out is that there are only about 500 people who speak the Native North American language sometimes called Kuchin (but more often Gwich’in), and they all live in Alaska or Canada. This made it seem odd to say the least. Certainly possible, in New York City anything is possible, but even the Endangered Language Alliance New York Map does not mention it in the Bronx. The ELA does identify a cluster of people who speak Salvadoran Kitchwa, which is Central American, and part of the Quecha family, mainly found in the Andes.

Digging around I notice that the Tibeto-Burman language Jingpho is also called Kuchin. That seems possibly more realistic since there are also an estimated 85 Burmese speakers. But Wikipedia helpfully tells us not to confuse Kuchin with the Kachi language also sometimes transliterated as “Katchi, Kutchhi, Kachchi, Kachchhi, Kachhi or Cutchi.” (with more options on the talk page). With around 20,000 estimated Bronx home speakers of languages associated with regions of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, I lean toward this option. But I am certain that either one is more likely than Gwich’in.

The 2009-13 ACS also estimates 830 Arawakian speakers, and that seems very possible given the extensive migration from South and Central America and the Caribbean. This group too is gone from the 2021 data, perhaps merged into “Other Central and South American languages.”

I understand the privacy reasons for doing this, but it’s still sad to me to lose access to this detail.

1. Maybe I need to get access to one of those confidential data sites.