New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani has discovered a novel way to promote free Broadway tickets for the city’s high-school students: speaking directly to them in Bengali, Mandarin, and Spanish.

The multilingual videos, which were released as part of a campaign promoting a lottery for more than 2,000 free Broadway tickets, have quickly become a talking point in their own right, with social media users praising Mamdani’s apparent talent for languages and celebrating the effort to reach New York’s famously diverse communities.

The initiative, announced by Mamdani in partnership with the non-profit Theatre Development Fund (TDF), is offering 2,100 free Broadway tickets to New York City high-school students.

Students selected in the lottery can claim up to two tickets, with the tickets covering seven productions. The lottery opened on 13 August and was due to close at 10am on 17 August, with the draw scheduled for 1 September.

However, it was Mamdani’s language skills that stole much of the attention.

The Spanish clip posted on Saturday set the tone for what followed, with Mamdani delivering the announcement in a language he has used before on the campaign trail. Snow White star Rachel Zegler commented: “ur spanish is so good my guy”, while language-learning app Duolingo asked: “how do you know every language”.

Born in Kampala to Indian parents, filmmaker Mira Nair and academic Mahmood Mamdani, he spent his early childhood in Uganda and three years in Cape Town before moving to New York at seven. During his political career, Mamdani has frequently switched between languages including Arabic, Hindi, and Urdu when addressing voters.

The next day, Mamdani posted his video in Mandarin.

Journalist Bethany Allen was among those wondering how Mamdani had managed to get his Mandarin tones so right, calling it “extraordinary”. In Mandarin, subtle changes in pitch can alter the meaning of a word, making them one of the trickier aspects of the language.

“Many people study Chinese for years and can never achieve such good tones. And his pronunciation is also shockingly good. He can pronounce a retroflex sound,” Allen wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

Journalist and comedian Francesca Fiorentini joked that Mamdani’s Mandarin had just given Chinese mothers another impossibly high bar for their children to clear, writing: “Our Chinese moms are already asking us why we're not mayors of a major metropolitan city and now he can speak Mandarin like this?! What's his SAT score again?”

Mamdani had studied Mandarin at the Bronx High School of Science, which he attended from 2006 to 2010, according to the New York Times. A spokesperson for the mayor told the outlet that Mamdani had not seriously studied or spoken Mandarin since his high-school years.

Korean-American singer and rapper Audrey Nuna, who provided the singing voice for Mira in KPop Demon Hunters, simply commented: “I love this man”.

Duolingo, meanwhile, had a more practical question: “How long is your streak?”

One user wrote: “Holy cow, when was the last time a NYC mayor spoke in Chinese?! My auntie’s going to be ecstatic,” while another joked: “Man, the aunties are going to have a field day talking about you at dim sum.”

And then finally, came Bengali.

Mamdani’s Bengali video opens with the distinctly familiar greeting “Kemon acho, New York City high schoolers? (How are you, New York City high schoolers?)” and carries on in Bengali before signing off: “Thikachey, tahole dekha hobe show te (Alright then, see you at the show).”

The reaction from Bengali-speaking New Yorkers and non-residents was immediate; one commenter wrote that they hadn’t lived around Bengali-speaking people in more than a decade, “but I understand everything he’s saying, now I’m crying lmao”.

Duolingo, meanwhile, appeared to be getting increasingly exasperated by the mayor’s multilingual exploits, commenting: “Stop tagging me…I AM NOT HOLDING THE MAYOR HOSTAGE.”

Another user summed up the entire campaign in a single line: “Bro’s collecting all the languages like Pokémon.”