At the time of writing, the current population of New York City is 8.468 million people. In 2018, 3.1 million of these residents were immigrants. These 3.1 million—and the millions of immigrants before them, all the way back to the founding of New Amsterdam in 1624—brought their languages with them. In Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York, linguist Ross Perlin talks about New York City as an unexpected repository for the world’s languages, from the most widely spoken to some of the most rarely spoken. He highlights the work of staff and volunteers at the Endangered Languages Alliance to record and preserve languages on the rarer end of things.
Perlin opens Language City with a history of New York city that not only focuses on languages but also discrimination against immigrants, why people pack up and move thousands of miles, and the ways that immigrants have created their own cheek-by-jowl enclaves. After this meandering overview of New York’s linguistic landscape, Perlin travels with six speakers of endangered languages to their new homes in the city and back to the homelands of four of these languages. The experiences of speakers of Seke, Wakhi, Yiddish, Nahuatl, Lenape, and West African languages written using the N’Ko script reveal the astonishing variety and beauty of human speech, as well as the existential threat that these languages face from more dominant languages, globalism, and migration.
As an English speaker, there are few places in the world I can go where I won’t find an English speaker. If I can’t find an English speaker, as long as I have an internet connection I have tools like Google Scholar that can help me be understood in dozens of commonly spoken languages. The speakers profiled by Perlin, however, have had to learn one or more languages to be understood by people outside of their home villages or towns. I marvel at their linguistic ability. I also feel more than a little guilty at how hard these speakers have to work to keep their languages alive in America (and sometimes in their countries of origin). It’s more advantageous for their children to be fluent in the majority language. There may be little benefit in learning their parents’ language—except that the loss of a language means that so many stories, so many songs, and so much culture may be irrevocably lost.
Each speaker’s section drummed the theme of language loss into my heart. Several of the speakers, like Boris the Yiddish speaker, only have a few aging speakers left to talk to. Karen, the Lenape speaker, worked with other Delaware and Lenape people to try and reconstruct her heritage language after it was nearly wiped out by centuries of anti-Indigenous policies by the United States and Canadian governments. Perlin emphasizes that it’s not just a point of pride to know and share these languages. We can learn new ways of seeing the world through the eyes of their speakers. For example, the grammar of Delaware and Lenape languages put plants and animals on the same grammatical footing as people. Seke speakers have different rules for telling stories depending on how the speaker came by the information (saw it, heard about it, etc.) Nahuatl includes poetic layers of meaning that make translation endlessly rewarding. Perlin doesn’t mention this but I personally have always had a soft spot for the wit and snark of Yiddish.
More than once as I was reading Language City I felt the need to hop onto the Endangered Language Alliance’s website or onto YouTube so that I could hear all of these languages spoken. I envy Perlin that he can take a walk through Queens or Brooklyn and hear so many different languages, from all over the world. I hope that Perlin and the staff and volunteers at the ELA can keep these and other immigrant languages alive.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.