Language City by Ross Perlin

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 improbably refuge for embattled and endangered languages. Never before have cities like New York have 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 form heavily minority and Indigenous zones of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. At the very moment when languages worldwide are disappearing at an unprecedent rate, many of the last speakers are on the move. Far from being confined to remote islands, towering mountains, or impenetrable jungles, they remain invisible and their words inaudible.

Ross Perlin is a linguist behind New York's Endangered Languages Alliance, a kind of ad hoc meet-up space where speakers of minority languages teach them or record them, working to preserve them in the face of erasure. Similar efforts are certainly being made around the world, but only in New York is it possible to capture as many languages as the ELA serves. I have to admit to a little tingle of pride when Perlin describes New York City as the most linguistically diverse city in the history of the world. In fact, it's one of my favorite things about the city: walking around and hearing, in the course of an hour, French, Spanish, German, and Arabic, and many other languages besides that I'm unable to identify. Perlin's book is about some of those languages: languages that are spoken by minorities even in their homelands, and which resurface here in New York where they have a new opportunity to thrive.

This is actually a central point in the first section of the book, something that I'd never considered: immigrants to New York, and perhaps most major metropolises, are typically minorities in their homelands. Of course, it makes a lot of sense, doesn't it? Dominant groups don't need to immigrate because they are dominant where they are. As a result, Perlin explains, what we think of as singular national languages are actually often patchworks of minority languages stitched together under a single umbrella, as with speakers of Sicilian and Ligurian and whatever else that get knitted together as "Italian." It was interesting to learn, for example, that most Iraqi immigrants to New York are Jewish. It's a dynamic that brings with it a complicated push-and-pull: the immigrant city offers a space for minority languages to thrive, but it also threatens to subsume them under national identities that supplant the language, too. This section of the book--the linguistic history of New York, beginning with Lenape speakers and Dutch immigrants and including the major immigrant waves of the 19th and 20th centuries--was my favorite.

About half the book is taken up with a series of biographies of speakers of minority languages who work with ELA. Much of the attention on the book has focused on Rasmina, a speaker of a Himalayan language called Seke, whose speakers all occupy a single "vertical village" building in Brooklyn. Of 700 extant speakers of Seke, one hundred live in this building! But there are others, too: a writer and academic who speaks Bessarabian Yiddish, a restaurateur who speaks the Indigenous Mexican language Nahuatl, and Ibrahima, who helps spread the N'ko alphabet of West Africa. Anyone who knows my particular interests won't be surprised to hear that I most enjoyed the story of Karen, a Lenape speaker who worked improbably to revitalize the language here in the heart of Lenape homelands. Karen's story makes it clear that much of the Lenape language has been lost and has to be created anew; while there's a sadness to this, it also seems like a powerful communitarian act. Languages, Language City reminds us, are communities. And at a time when the powers that be are trying as hard as they can to eliminate the exact kinds of immigrants this book describes, it was powerful to be reminded of just what these language communities add to the greatest city in the world.