According to US English's report, which is based on data from the 2000 census, 322 distinct languages are spoken in homes across the country and New York, after Los Angeles, is the second most linguistically diverse city, with 129.

New York, by instinct a port, a place where people are proud to speak Hebrew and Italian, is relaxed about its many tongues. Unlike other cities and states in America, which over the years have felt under siege from Spanish or French and have passed laws to make English their official language, New York has remained polyglot. The ticket machines on the subway operate in nine languages and English language schools advertise in eleven.

As if to emphasise the point, New York is also the home of the International Linguistic Association, whose next meeting will deal with, among other things, "the acquisition of relative clauses by Chinese people learning Italian spontaneously as a second language". And when I told Effie Papatzikou Cochran, a professor of forensic linguistics at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a member of the ILA, about the variety of languages in the survey, she was pleased.

An opponent of groups like US English, which wish to make English the official language of America, Professor Papatzikou Cochran said: "Why lose everything and become a melting pot? You can still be a salad bowl. In one bowl but still retaining one's individuality, so you can still tell the cucumber from the tomato from the parsley and the lettuce."

New York, like everywhere, has not always been so hospitable. Looking down the list of the city's languages, I wanted to see how many American Indian dialects had survived the arrival of English and Dutch in the 17th century. There were only smatterings of Cherokee and Cree, so I called Rosemary Richmond, executive director of American Indian Community House, a social services organization for New York's native residents.

"There are too many languages and not enough people to have a class for each one," said Ms Richmond, before explaining that, as children, her grandparents, Akwesasne Indians from upstate New York, were sent to boarding schools and forcibly purged of their Mohawk vocabulary to become American.

Nowadays, of course, New York is more language-refuge than exterminator. Among its rarer linguists, with speakers of Efik (a Kwa language from Niger and Congo) and of Syriac (the modern form of Aramaic) there are those that speak Uyghur and Hakka.

Uyghur is a Turkic language currently under threat in Western China, where it is being removed from schools because of its association with Islam. Hakka is also a Chinese language, from mainland China and Taiwan, whose speakers have been persecuted and who have spread themselves thinly across the world.

To find New York's Uyghur speakers (there are 535 according to the survey) I spoke to Gulametta Pahta, a 72-year-old Uyghur campaigner who lives on Long Island and he gave me directions to a restaurant.

Like most truly rare things in New York, the restaurant was in Queens. Queens, the last part of New York to be heavily populated, is one of the most ethnically miraculous places on earth. According to the US English report, there are 105 languages spoken in the borough, with English the language of choice in only 45 per cent of homes.

Out in Woodside, under the roaring flight-path of planes coming into land at La Guardia airport, I couldn't find the Uyghur restaurant. Instead there was a Korean "Church of Golden Faith" advertising its services in Spanish and an Irish pub offering "a whole pig buffett" for St Patrick's Day.

As I asked directions (first from a woman who spoke Gaelic and then from a postman who spoke Burmese) it was clear that I might find everything except Uyghur. In the end, following a tip from a man from Guatemala who offered to teach me Quechua (the 102nd rarest language in New York) I found myself opposite a shop that sold sandwiches, Indian saris and offered a sea cargo service to Balikpapan in Indonesia.

Giving up on Uyghur for the moment, I headed back to Manhattan's Chinatown to find some Hakka speakers. I had found a shop called "Hakka Enterprises Corp" in the phonebook and had arranged to meet its owner, Tony Liu. Mr Liu greeted me eating a ham sandwich in the back of his shop, which was filled from floor to ceiling with old tills, copy machines and fading, outdated signs, which said things like "Smoking Permitted".

Mr Liu said the survey was wrong about Hakka and that there were 3,000 Hakka speakers in New York alone. "Hakka is safe," he said. To prove his point, Mr Liu took me across the street to the brown door of the "Tsung Tsin Association," a Hakka community centre founded in 1971. Upstairs there was a room filled with the clatter of mah-jongg pieces and old Chinese men and women sitting at plastic tables, playing and speaking Hakka. One of the association's secretaries told me that Tsung Tsin had 4,500 members.

Mr Liu, an affable man wearing a red General Electric company cap, couldn't explain why so few Hakka speakers had specified their language on their census forms - according to the survey there should only be 60 Hakka speakers in New York. But he stressed how Hakka (which means "guest") culture is a secondary concern for Chinese immigrants coming to New York and America. "Chinese come here only to create a living," said Mr Liu, "not much people have the time to talk about the culture."

As for the question of whether English would keep its place, dominating New York ahead of growing languages like Mandarin, Spanish and Russian, Mr Liu was adamant. "Of course English", he said, because it remains the key to any well-paid job. But when he described the anglicising search for financial security, Mr Liu couldn't help but show a little linguistic complexity: "A lot of people just come for the money," he said. "Mucho dinero, you know?"

Slices of New York