New York, the World’s Most Linguistically Diverse Metropolis

Half of all 7,000-plus human languages may disappear over the next century, and—because many have never been recorded—when they’re gone, it will be forever. Ross Perlin, a lecturer in Columbia’s Department of Slavic Languages and co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, is racing against time to map little-known languages across New York. In his new book, Language City, Perlin follows six speakers of endangered languages deep into their communities, from the streets of Brooklyn and Queens to villages on the other side of the world, to learn how they are maintaining and reviving their languages against overwhelming odds. He explores the languages themselves, from rare sounds to sentence-long words to bits of grammar that encode entirely different worldviews.

Seke is spoken by 700 people from five ancestral villages in Nepal, and a hundred others living in a single Brooklyn apartment building. N’ko is a radical new West African writing system now going global in Harlem and the Bronx. After centuries of colonization and displacement, Lenape, the city’s original indigenous language and the source of the name Manhattan, “the place where we get bows,” has just one native speaker, along with a small band of revivalists. Also profiled in the book are speakers of the indigenous Mexican language Nahuatl, the Central Asian minority language Wakhi, and Yiddish, braided alongside Perlin’s own complicated family legacy. On the 100th anniversary of a notorious anti-immigration law that closed America’s doors for decades, and the 400th anniversary of New York’s colonial founding, Perlin raises the alarm about growing political threats and the onslaught of languages like English and Spanish.

Perlin talks about the book with Columbia News, along with why New York is so linguistically diverse, and his current and upcoming projects.

How did this book come about?

I’m a linguist, writer, and translator, and have been focused on language endangerment and documentation for the last two decades. Initially, I worked in southwest China on a dictionary, a descriptive grammar, and corpus of texts for Trung, a language spoken in a single remote valley on the Burmese border. While finishing up my dissertation, I came back to New York and joined the Endangered Language Alliance (ELA), which had recently been founded to focus on urban linguistic diversity.

ELA’s key insight was a paradox: Even as language loss accelerates everywhere—with as many as half of the world’s 7,000 languages now considered endangered—cities are more linguistically diverse than ever before, thanks to migration, urbanization, and diaspora. This means that speakers of endangered, indigenous, and primarily oral languages are now often right next door, and that fieldwork can happen in a different key, with linguists and communities making common cause as neighbors, for the long term.

For the last 12 years, I’ve been ELA’s co-director, together with Daniel Kaufman. Leading a small, independent nonprofit has been its own adventure. We do everything from in-depth research on little-studied languages (projects on Jewish, Himalayan, and indigenous Latin American languages, for example, with much of the research happening right here in the five boroughs) to public events, classes, collaborations with city agencies, childrens books, and the first-ever language map of New York City. At some point, I knew that all my notes on everything I was learning and seeing around the city and beyond had to become a book. The urgency only grew as a series of unprecedented crises started hitting the immigrant and diaspora communities we work with. The crises are still unfolding.

Can you share some details about the six people you portray in the book, and the endangered languages they speak?

Language City is both the story of New York’s languages—the past, present, and future of the world's most linguistically diverse city—and the story of six specific people doing extraordinary things to keep their embattled mother tongues alive. They come from all over the world, but converge in New York. They represent a variety of strategies for language maintenance and revitalization in the face of tremendous odds. All of them are people I’ve known and worked with for years. Between them, in all their multilingualism, they actually speak about 30 languages, but they are also regular people you might run into on the subway.

Rasmina is one of the youngest speakers of Seke, a language from five villages in Nepal, and now a sixth, vertical village in the middle of Brooklyn. Husniya, a speaker of Wakhi from Tajikistan, has gone through every stage of her life and education in a different language, and can move easily along New York City’s new Silk Road. Originally from Moldova, Boris is a Yiddish novelist, poet, editor, and one-man linguistic infrastructure.

Ibrahima, a language activist from Guinea, champions N’ko, a relatively new writing system created to challenge the dominance of colonial languages in West Africa. Irwin is a Queens chef who writes poetry in, and cooks through, his native Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. And Karen is a keeper of Lenape, the original language of the land on which New York was settled. 

How did New York end up as such a linguistically diverse city? 

Four hundred years ago, this Lenape-speaking archipelago became nominally Dutch under the West India Company. In fact, the territory evolved into an unusual commercial entrepôt at the fulcrum of three continents, where the languages of Native Americans, enslaved Africans, and European refugees and traders were all in the mix. A reported 18 languages were spoken by the first 400-500 inhabitants. This set the template, but the defining immigration waves of the 19th and 20th centuries were of another order, as New York became a global center for business, politics, and culture, as well as the pre-eminent gateway to the U.S. and a bridge between hemispheres. From the half-remembered myth of Ellis Island to the very present reality of 200,000 asylum seekers arriving in the last few years, I argue—in what I think is the first linguistic history of any city—that applying the lens of language helps us understand the city (and all cities) in profoundly new ways. From Frisian and Flemish 400 years ago, to Fujianese and Fulani today, deep linguistic diversity, although always overlooked, has been fundamental.

What did you teach in the spring semester?

Last fall, I taught the class I’ve taught every year for the last six years—Endangered Languages in the Global City. I designed it around our research at ELA, and it’s completely unique to Columbia. Hundreds of students sign up, testifying to the massive interest Columbia students have in learning about linguistic diversity, though we can admit only a fraction of them. Many of the endangered language speakers and activists featured in Language City have visited the class, and we also take students out to some of the city’s most linguistically diverse neighborhoods, where many students have done strikingly original fieldwork.

The spring semester was something of a departure: I stepped in to teach Language and Society, as well as a course I designed last year called Languages of Asia, which focuses on the continent’s lesser-known language families and linguistic areas. I’ve also been supervising senior theses together with Meredith Landman,who directs the undergraduate program in linguistics. Across the first half of the 20th century, Columbia and Barnard became foundational sites for the study of linguistic diversity and for documenting languages, thanks to Franz Boas, who, in 1902, became the head of Columbia’s anthropology department—the first in the country—and his students. There is hope today for Columbia’s formative role to be revived: The University's local and global position makes this as urgent and achievable as ever. Additionally, the linguistics major was recently (at last) restored, and an ever-growing number of students are doing remarkable work on languages from around the world. 

What are you working on now?

ELA keeps on ELA’ing, with a huge range of projects. On any given day, we might be recording and working with speakers of languages originally from Guatemala, Nepal, or Iran. With 700+ languages and counting, our language map (languagemap.nyc) is continually being updated, and we have people here making connections between language and health, education, literacy, technology, translation. This fall, I’ll be in Berlin as a fellow of the American Academy, researching via an obscure film (in 2,000 languages and counting) how missionary linguists and Bible translators shape global linguistic diversity.

Any summer plans related to language preservation at Columbia or elsewhere?

Ongoing work at ELA: The sky, if not for the budget, would be the limit. There have been recent sessions on a little-known language from Afghanistan, with a woman who is probably the only speaker in New York. Someone whose family still remembers a highly endangered Jewish language variant from Iran recently got in touch. And we met a speaker of a Mongolic language of western China at a restaurant. I also hope to continue soon some scouting of urban linguistic diversity in the Caucasus, past and present, with support from the Harriman Institute.