How New York City Became a Haven For Endangered Languages

Up on the sixth floor of an old commercial building along the sunless canyon of Eighteenth Street, there is a room where languages from all over the world converge. Clouds of tangled wires choke overworked recording equipment. Sticky notes whose meaning is lost to time frame the streaky monitors of three beleaguered computers. Tacked up at random are untranslatable posters, yellowing maps of places that few people have ever heard of, and calendars in half a dozen languages and calendrical systems, all turned to the wrong month and usually for the wrong year.

Every surface displays donations proudly shlepped from distant villages, including Garifuna drums in need of repair, a dried-out Mexican corncob, textiles from Timor, and a trilingual shopping bag that teaches Romansh, a minority language of Switzerland. Titles like Warrabarna Kaurna! Reclaiming an Australian Language, The Architect of Modern Catalan, and The Sociolinguistics of Borderlands fill the shelves. Half-busted filing cabinets bulge with linguistic and bureaucratic papers, surrounded by strewn stacks of rare ring-bound studies, hard drives and tapes of every format, and an invaluable “Rolodex,” a fragile paper cascade with hundreds of highly unusual business cards.

Speakers of Bishnupriya Manipuri, a minority language of Bangladesh (and now Queens), prepare a song in the corner. A Quechua teacher from Peru (long resident in Brooklyn) gets ready for class at the same table where a Tsou speaker from Taiwan (now living in California) is correcting the proofs of her children’s book. A linguist in over-ear headphones edits recordings in the Gabonese language Ikota, made with the one known speaker in the city, who lives on Roosevelt Island.

Just entering is a young Chuvash activist from Russia, recently settled in Harlem, who is here to strategize about the future of his people’s language. In the tiny makeshift studio attached, used for an on-and-off Indigenous internet radio station, a Totonac shaman from Mexico (and now New Jersey) declaims into a microphone, calling New York the new Teotihuacán.

This is the Endangered Language Alliance, the only organization anywhere focused on the linguistic diversity of cities, and especially on endangered, Indigenous, and primarily oral languages. ELA (for short) is where an eccentric extended family of linguists, language activists, polyglots, enthusiasts, and ordinary New Yorkers tune in to the deeper frequencies of the surrounding city, and by extension the world.

The languages heard here are generally not recognized by governments, used by businesses, or taught in classrooms, though they are fully capable of expressing anything that any other human language can express. The world’s leading libraries have no books about them, let alone in them, because there aren’t any. Nor, in many cases, are there recordings, dictionaries, grammatical descriptions, or other materials. Google’s claim to “organize the world’s information” and Facebook’s bluster about “bringing the world closer together” ring hollow when those websites operate in just over a hundred languages, and even Wikipedia (at the time of writing) is in only 331.

Of the world’s approximately seven thousand languages—not counting all the dialects, sociolects, ethnolects, religiolects, and local varieties—up to half are likely to disappear over the next few centuries. Languages are being lost every year. The least documented are the most threatened. Few nonspeakers have heard of them, and most are used by only the smallest and most marginalized groups: just 4 percent of the world’s population now speaks 96 percent of the world’s languages. The situation is even more dire for the approximately two hundred sign languages. Hundreds of entire language families (groups of historically related languages, typically reaching back thousands of years) are also likely to be lost.

This book is about the most linguistically diverse city in the history of the world: its past, present, and future. Now home to over seven hundred languages, early twenty-first century New York City is especially a last improbable refuge for embattled and endangered languages. Never before have cities like New York been so linguistically various, and they may never be again, but this new hyperdiversity has hardly been mapped, let alone understood or supported.

In particular, in just the last few decades, hundreds of thousands of people speaking hundreds of languages have arrived in New York from heavily minority and Indigenous zones of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. At the very moment when languages worldwide are disappearing at an unprecedented rate, many of the last speakers are on the move. Far from being confined to remote islands, towering mountains, or impenetrable jungles, they are now right next door, though to majority groups they remain invisible and their words inaudible. Theirs are the stories that intersect on Eighteenth Street and form the core of this book.

We begin by moving from ELA to the level of a single neighborhood and then to the wider metropolitan area. In outline we describe the linguistic life of cities, the forces threatening linguistic diversity, and how linguists and speakers are fighting back.

Diving into the past, we then explore how a single city, New York, has served as a home for so many languages. In four loosely chronological chapters, we chart how the Lenape archipelago became in turn a polyglot port of minority peoples, a center of refuge for communities of survivors, an Indigenous metropolis, and finally an unprecedented microcosm of global linguistic diversity (albeit a very particular one).

Turning to the present, we follow six speakers of endangered languages from Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas, all now living in New York and striving to find a place in the city and the world for their mother tongues.

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Excerpted from Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York © 2024 by Ross Perlin. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Press UK, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc. All rights reserved.