Language City E-Book

Ross Perlin

• Herausgeber: Grove Press UK
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 725

Beschreibung

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 linguist and co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, is racing against time to map little-known languages across the most linguistically diverse city in history: contemporary New York. In Language City, Perlin recounts the unique history of immigration that shaped the city, and follows six remarkable yet ordinary speakers of endangered languages deep into their communities to learn how they are maintaining and reviving their languages against overwhelming odds. Perlin also dives deep into their languages, taking us on a fascinating tour of unusual grammars, rare sounds and powerful cultural histories from all around the world. Both remarkable social history and testament to the importance of linguistic diversity, Language City is a joyful and illuminating exploration of a city and the world that made it.

Leseprobe

Also by Ross Perlin

Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy

*

ROSS PERLIN is a linguist, writer and translator. He has written for the New York Times, the Guardian, Harper’s and n+1, and the Endangered Language Alliance has been covered by the New York Times, the New Yorker, the BBC, NPR and many other outlets. Perlin was a New Arizona Fellow at New America, and he is a native New Yorker.

rossperlin.com

First published in the United States of America in 2024 by Grove Atlantic

First published in Great Britain in 2024 by Grove Press UK, an imprint of Grove Atlantic

Copyright © Ross Perlin, 2024

The moral right of Ross Perlin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

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A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

Paperback ISBN 978 1 80471 071 5

E-book ISBN 978 1 80471 072 2

Printed in Great Britain

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For Cecil

CONTENTS

Preface: The Limits of My Language

I.     Thousands of Natural Experiments

A Room on Eighteenth Street

A Home in Queens

A Snapshot of Babel

A Brief Guide to Radical Linguistics

II.    Past

Minority Port

Survivor City

Indigenous Metropolis

Global Microcosm

III.  Present

Rasmina - (Seke)

Husniya - ik (Wakhi)

Boris - (Yiddish)

Ibrahima - )N‘ko(

Irwin - Nahuatl

Karen - Lunaape (Lenape)

IV.  Future

Acknowledgments

A Note on Sources

Notes

PREFACE

The Limits of My Language

Don’t ask a linguist how many languages they speak.

Some may blurt out a number just to change the subject (“Fifteen!”), but then people usually want a list, even a quick performance. Rattling off the names of unfamiliar languages tends to end the conversation quickly. Many linguists are extraordinary polyglots, like Roman Jakobson, who is said to have been dazed after an accident and started calling for help in the twenty-five he knew. But most linguists study Language, not languages.

Every one of us has a linguistic history, however buried or unexamined. Here, very briefly, is mine. Like most Americans, my family left behind its original languages, moving closer to Dominant American English with every generation.1 My great-grandma Bessy, who sold corsets in Queens and was known as The General, crossed the ocean by herself at the age of sixteen (“an unaccompanied minor,” they would say today). Bessy could get by in Yiddish, Polish, Russian, German, and, starting on the boat, heavily accented English. It was more or less the same with my other seven great-grandparents, all multilingual Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe with little formal schooling who sailed in steerage into New York Harbor around 1900. Their children, my grandparents, grew up first with Yiddish, seasoned only with bits of the other languages, before shifting wholesale to the New York Jewish English that reigned in Brooklyn and the Bronx in the 1920s and ’30s. Despite some telltale tics, my parents tacked hard toward the “accent from nowhere” inculcated at school, piped in by TV, and pushed in a thousand ways, overtly and covertly, in the fast- assimilating neighborhoods and suburbs of the mid-twentieth century city.

I grew up with the privilege of Dominant American English, only a trace of the New York inflection, but I longed for other languages. A city of unprecedented linguistic diversity was rising all around me, although I didn’t know it at the time. My chance to become bi- or multilingual—at least to sound like a native speaker, even with a second-grade vocabulary—came and went with the “critical period” before adolescence.2 “Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt,” wrote Ludwig Wittgenstein. The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. So fundamental were my limits that I was hardly aware of them.

Second-language classes started when I was eleven, later than almost anywhere else in the world.3 Like many monolinguals, I saw them as a graded game confined to school, not a fundamental imperative for living. At the same time, linguistic hierarchies were impossible to miss. Unconsciously I had learned to register most other forms of English as somehow lesser. Now I sensed the same with Spanish, which wasn’t offered at school despite being both the city’s and the country’s second language, crucial for anyone hoping to feel at home in the hemisphere. In theory it was Cervantes and Salamanca, but in practice it was a working-class, immigrant, brown-skinned language at the bottom of the social hierarchy, often spoken at a lower volume when Anglophones were around.

French, on the other hand, was required. Its lingering elite prestige goes back almost a thousand years, when a small group of Norman French speakers conquered a large group of diversely dialected Old English speakers. That’s how the resulting hybrid language ended up with different words for animals in the field (Old English–derived cow, pig, sheep, deer) versus on the plate (French-derived beef, pork, mutton, venison). Century after century, Middle and Modern English were continually forged through French, including not only words like elite and prestige but lake, mountain, flower, and thousands of others which now seem impeccably English. Like many English speakers, I heard both elegance and arrogance in the roll of French uvular /r/ or a cascade of nasal vowels.4 I learned to say je ne sais quoi and raison d’être, correctly but not too correctly, not to show I knew French but to show I was a certain kind of English speaker.5

Classes in “dead languages” also fed a certain kind of English. Latin and Ancient Greek appeared as codes to crack, things to master, lists to memorize and unlock worlds. A smattering of Hebrew at Hebrew school was neither fully dead nor really alive, poised uncertainly between the ancient and modern languages. It felt safer to explore a language if there was no one you could speak it to. If reading is about pressing headlong and half-conscious into a mess of meaning, we didn’t even read so much as decipher, where it’s the romance of a person alone in a room—Champollion with the hieroglyphs, Ventris the architect tinkering with Linear B after work—incommunicado while cracking ancient communication. Language as form, which is the beginning of linguistics.

In college, I tried inhaling Old Norse, Uighur, Luo, Russian, and Arabic, racing like a bucket-list traveler to stamp the pages of my linguistic passport. Above all I threw myself into Mandarin, keen to go up against its proverbial difficulty.6 Speakers themselves now know it as guóyǔnational language, pǔtónghuà common speech, zhōngwén, or hànyǔHan/Chinese language, but Europeans call it Mandarin from an old Indic word for counsel (same root as mantra) that passed through Portuguese in the seventeenth century and came to mean a type of orange, a senior official, the icy detachment of such officials, and eventually the form of Chinese those officials spoke, guānhuà. Just one of countless spoken varieties under the heading of “Chinese,”7 Mandarin is still distinguished in part by its strangely officious flavor, now with a Communist twist: “simultaneously austere and vacuous, intimidating yet elusive, in short stuffy and puffy at the same time,” as Perry Link puts it.8

A year into classes, I could barely string together a sentence, but my conception of human language was already wonderfully warped beyond recognition. There seemed to be native words for everything, and few clear cognates with or borrowings from other languages. There were complex tones: putting the mantra back in Mandarin, I would play an audio file on loop and mutter the same syllable hundreds of times: mā má mǎ mà . . . There were chéngyǔ, the elaborate, the elaborate four-syllable phrases derived from Classical Chinese but often used in contemporary speech, distilling poetry and wisdom into the tiniest spaces: yīyè zhīqiū. From one leaf’s fall, you know that it’s autumn. From a single sign comes the wider revelation.

As for reading and writing—over fifty thousand characters attested across a three-thousand-year written tradition—you’re not sufficiently obsessed until you’re constantly tracing them with a wagging finger in the air, each stroke in the proper order. Far from being ideograms that represent meanings directly through images, characters are intricately entangled with the spoken language. Basic literacy is sometimes said to mean memorizing a minimum of three thousand, which is still no guarantee of being able to read a newspaper article.

I moved to Beijing for six months of full-time language study, under a pledge to speak English only on phone calls home. By then I could carry on a conversation, exhausting myself in the process, but it was easier to discuss economic development than to give directions. I still bludgeoned every other sentence, could only dream of nuance, and was haunted by the feeling, in the city’s cold smoky beauty, that I was just translating from the nonstop English ticker running through my head. Even when I did (almost) sound like a native speaker, did it make any sense for me to sound that way? For the first but not the last time, I faced the unmistakable connection between language, identity, and appearance. Mandarin may eventually become a global language beyond the global Chinese diaspora, but for now anyone who speaks it without looking Chinese is a curiosity, an anomaly, a question mark. Reactions veer quickly from total incomprehension to overblown praise, while Chinese Americans are unfairly expected to be fluent.

One day in Beijing, I went to a talk by the legendary Chinese linguist Sǔn Hóngkāi. At first I was just trying to keep up with his Mandarin. Only gradually did I grasp the life’s work he was describing: half a century spent documenting as many of China’s approximately 300 languages as possible (hardly counting forms of Chinese). That was also the first time I heard the phrase endangered languages ( bīnwěi yǔyán).

A few years later, with a little linguistics, I went to southwest China, as Professor Sun had.9 Chasing leads from scholars and street vendors, I took buses and shared jeeps from valley to valley across mountainous Yunnan province, home to over a hundred languages. Finally I came to Gongshan, the tiny seat of one of China’s poorest counties. In this new frontier town of already rotting buildings, Han Chinese settlers were setting up shop and minority groups from surrounding villages were coming in search of work, education, health care, and consumer goods. Among them were speakers of Trung, whose homeland was a day’s journey away by shared jeep on an unpaved road that was life-threatening in summer and impassable in winter. It was literally at the end of the road, on China’s remote border with Tibet and a breakaway part of Myanmar, that the Trung world began.10

Working first through Mandarin, I gradually learned to speak some of the language, which is only distantly related to Chinese, Tibetan, Burmese, and hundreds of other little-known languages in the Tibeto-Burman family, now also known as Trans-Himalayan.11 With no formal teachers, dictionaries, grammars, or textbooks, the only way to learn was by living with people, asking endless questions, and developing the materials to teach myself. Grounded in fieldwork and verging on anthropology, language documentation in this vein has been going on for centuries, but is now being dramatically transformed by technology and the urgency of global language loss.

With fewer than seven thousand speakers, Trung had evolved for the way of life in a single valley, but everything was changing. Hunting and swidden (“slash and burn”) agriculture, the traditional modes of subsistence, had recently been banned for environmental reasons, upending the group’s very basis of livelihood. By fiat the government was replacing all the older log cabins with new houses. Electricity and signal towers were enabling cell phones and TVs, bringing Mandarin directly into hands and homes. Children were leaving the valley for boarding schools, which function completely in Mandarin. The remnants of traditional religious life, shattered by the Cultural Revolution, were being swept away by a local form of evangelical Christianity.

My task was to record, transcribe, and translate all the stories, songs, and conversations I could, analyzing the grammar, probing the dialects of different villages, documenting knowledge of the local environment, and ultimately compiling a dictionary in a newly devised Latin-based writing system, together with three Trung speakers, known in Chinese as Yáng Jiānglíng Lǐ Jīnmíng and Lǐ Aıxīn

I spent three years in Yunnan, enough to lay the groundwork for a PhD, but there is enough work involved in documenting any language to last a lifetime. A world was slipping away even faster than the words that referred to it. I barely understood either the world or the words, but I was trying to record them for posterity, or at least as long as the digital files may last. I have never done anything harder.12

One night at a village feast, I took out my recorder as the singing started. But this time the singer turned it back toward me: “Menju chuq pvo! Now sing some of your songs!”13

I couldn’t remember a single one.

I. Thousands ofNatural Experiments

A ROOM ONEIGHTEENTH STREET

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.1 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 331.2

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.3 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.4 The situation is even more dire for the approximately two hundred sign languages.5 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.6 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.

In her early twenties, Rasmina feels the burden of being one of the youngest people anywhere who can speak Seke, a language from five villages in Nepal with seven hundred speakers, over a hundred of whom have moved to a vertical village, a single building in Brooklyn, as part of a vast new Himalayan migration of extraordinary linguistic complexity.

Every stage of Husniya’s life and education has happened in a different language, with English her ninth (depending on how you count). She feels at home almost anywhere along the new Silk Road that runs through Brooklyn and Queens, but is devoted to developing her native language Wakhi and the other Pamiri languages of Tajikistan, which are spoken by one of the city’s smallest and newest communities.

Boris, born after the Holocaust in Soviet Moldova and now living deep in post-Soviet Brooklyn, refuses to be the last Yiddish writer. He believes that a language can linger through literature, as long as a faithful few continue writing and reading. Even as a new spoken Hasidic Yiddish is growing all around him, it’s hard for Boris to know who will read his secular creations, including the storied newspaper he spent eighteen years trying to breathe new life into.

Ibrahima, a language activist from Guinea, also counts on the written word and its associated technologies for linguistic survival. He is determined to promote N’ko, a writing system created in 1949 to challenge the dominance of colonial languages and unite over forty million speakers of Manding languages across West Africa, as well as its major new outposts in Harlem and the Bronx.

Irwin is a Queens chef unearthing the roots of Mexican cooking through his native Nahuatl, which is still spoken today by over 1.6 million Indigenous Mexicans and a growing number in New York. Not only Nahuatl, but Mixtec, K’iche’, Mam, and dozens of other Indigenous Latin American languages have arrived in the city in the last few decades, though the tens of thousands who speak them—many considered undocumented immigrants in their home hemisphere—struggle for justice at the bottom of the city’s social and economic hierarchy.

And Karen, a keeper of Lenape, the land’s original language, which she helped bring back to New York for the first time in three centuries. There is only a single elderly native speaker, hundreds of miles away in Canada, but Karen and others both there and across the Lenape diaspora have been courageously reclaiming and reviving the language against all odds.7

Six individual voices speaking six languages: this is barely a beginning. Of course it’s not possible to mention, let alone discuss in detail, every language community.8 Among them, the six speakers actually speak over thirty languages. Nor does any of them live entirely or even predominantly in their mother tongue, though mother tongues are the focus here. All need larger regional and national languages to various degrees, as well as some English, and have to move nimbly from one linguistic ecology to another, whether it’s home, work, the neighborhood, a WhatsApp group, or anywhere else.

There are special challenges in writing about lesser-known languages, not only around sourcing and translation, but also because most are unwritten and unstandardized. For years I have been working with the six speakers to varying extents on their languages, but I am not a native speaker of any. They are my teachers, but any mistakes are mine alone. I settle for the matrix of English (or translation into what is likely another dominant language) to bring the sound and sense of their languages within earshot and to widen our acoustic range. Their words will not be sequestered in italics; it’s the English gloss that will.*

We end by approaching the future. Will cities just be last-minute outposts for endangered languages, or can they become sustainable sites for linguistic diversity? Can Babel—the real contemporary New York experiment, not the Biblical myth—actually work?

The idea on Eighteenth Street, however crazy, is to make Babel work. Somehow still going after almost fifteen years, ELA has always been a tiny operation, getting by on gumption and grace. It was founded in 2010 by the linguist Daniel Kaufman, who is still codirector, together with the linguist Juliette Blevins and the poet Bob Holman, who are both still on the board. For the last decade I have been codirector with Daniel.

Daniel heard Hebrew at home, but his English is pure New York. Though it clearly shaped him, he claims he was “just a witness” to the East Village underground scene in the nineties, hanging out at the Anarchist Switchboard with the neighborhood’s wayward radical punks. He started picking up Tagalog over speed chess in Washington Square Park with a hustler named Junior, “the greatest one-minute chess player in the world.” That led to college in the Philippines and an obsession with the Austronesian language family. He’s gone village to village in Madagascar, recording undocumented dialects of Malagasy. He listens to the latest rap from Borneo and Guam, digging the beats while scanning for deep prosodic patterns. His laptop and his marriage, to the founder of an Indonesian dance group in New York, run mostly in Indonesian.

Besides word of mouth, ELA has grown partly out of Daniel’s uncanny knack for finding speakers of smaller languages wherever he goes in the city. He chats with the cashier at the bodega on the other side of Eighteenth Street, who turns out to speak Ghale, a little-documented language of Nepal. Then he gets to know the speaker of Poqomchi’, the Mayan language from Guatemala, behind the deli counter. At an Indonesian wedding in Queens, he hits it off with another guest who turns out to be the city’s only speaker of Mamuju, from West Sulawesi. Taking cabs he meets speakers of Chantyal from Nepal and Chocha-Ngacha from Bhutan behind the wheel. “A rando calls me up by accident thinking I’m his friend,” he texts me one morning, “and he happens to be a trilingual speaker of K’iche’, Kaqchikel, and Acateco.” Neither finished nor unfinished, Daniel’s projects are perpetually open, embodying a vision of the city as a greenhouse, not a graveyard, for languages, as well as a crucial site for original linguistic research.9

A couple of articles in the New York Times and elsewhere also brought a wave of interest in ELA, leading over a hundred New Yorkers of all backgrounds to crowd the old Bowery Poetry Club, form neighborhood teams, and pound the pavement for languages along the Brighton Beach boardwalk, on the streets of Harlem, and in the plazas of Jackson Heights. For years it was all volunteer, though speakers have always been paid for their time, sometimes out of Daniel’s pocket. Only later did occasional grants begin to cover a few staff positions, with the work as disparate as analyzing the grammar of a specific Central Asian language and translating public health materials into Indigenous Mexican languages.

Though officially a nonprofit, ELA is more like a loose network of a few hundred people who share a passion for languages, helping however and whenever they can. It’s both a physical space and a quasi-official platform where linguists and speakers meet and collaborate on long-term, open-ended projects, as neighbors making common cause. Poets, artists, journalists, filmmakers, researchers, and policymakers are part of the network, bringing new kinds of visibility to languages, sometimes on a global level. Language activists and communities facing similar challenges or speaking related languages share strategies and join forces.

The work at ELA is very different from traditional linguistic fieldwork, which is closer to what I was doing with Trung in China. There can be fundamental problems when even the most dedicated outsider linguist drops into a far-off locale to document a language for the first and perhaps only time, then returns to the ivory tower. Though we have strong ties to universities—I teach at Columbia, and Daniel is at Queens College—ELA remains independent of both the bureaucracy and the narrow scholarly goals that can come with academic affiliation. Few universities anywhere dedicate resources to researching, teaching, or supporting endangered languages, or indeed to any languages beyond the most dominant and lucrative. Instead ELA takes its cue from the surrounding city, answering to language communities that few others know exist. Speakers and activists themselves initiate most of the projects, and through them we connect to communities on the other side of the world.

With its donated office in the heart of Manhattan now spilling into a sizeable new room, ELA itself has become an anarchic switchboard. We are constantly fielding messages from people trying to preserve their languages, record their relatives, get information, or simply find someone else to talk to.10 When they search online for a language, ELA’s website may be the only thing they can find. When they walk in the door, ELA’s grungy office at least makes clear, like no other space in the city, that all languages are welcome.

And so it usually starts. Alex, a young speaker of P’urhépecha born in the Michoacán highlands in Mexico, grew up in York, Pennsylvania, where over a hundred P’urhépecha speakers have moved for agricultural work, often on Christmas tree farms. As far as he knows, he’s the only speaker in New York, where he moved after college and immediately got in touch with us. Now for the last eight years, whenever time allows, he has been working with ELA to record his family in both Pennsylvania and Mexico, while also digitizing and translating old existing texts. He dreams of teaching the language to anyone who wants to learn it.

A Khasi speaker originally from eastern India, dropping in from Boston, explains how his language’s revival could be a model for others. A Pana speaker in the Bronx leaves a voice mail full of longing for the mother tongue he left behind at the age of seven in a village on the Mali–Burkina Faso border. “Has anything been written about my language?” he asks as soon as we meet. “Are there any recordings?”

If there are already extensive, high-quality recordings, which is seldom the case, a dictionary may be needed. If a dictionary has been published, there may not be a grammatical description, or a corpus of transcribed and translated texts. Even if there is robust documentation, it may not be digitized or accessible to the community. Although documenting and archiving can be essential prerequisites, a speaker or a community may be more focused on teaching, maintaining, or revitalizing their language, and this too can take any number of forms.

Language, for all its importance, is nothing without survival and livelihood. During the tumultuous recent years of the COVID-19 pandemic, it became ELA’s mission to help speakers of minority languages with timely information and resources, and to document the disproportionate impacts of the pandemic on these overlooked groups.11 Around the city and the world, there was an unprecedented effort to translate and disseminate COVID-related messages as quickly and accurately as possible. Speakers, linguists, and communities started doing it for hundreds of languages that have no official support and have never had recorded or written public health messages before. Language access saved lives, even as so many essential elders and native speakers of languages the world over, from Ojibwe in Minnesota to Yamalapiti in the Brazilian Amazon, were being lost.

_________________

* For languages written in non-Latin scripts, I include key initial words or passages in both the script itself and a Latin-based transliteration, but thereafter stick mostly to transliteration for the sake of simplicity.

A HOME IN QUEENS

Eighteenth Street is our base, but the real day-to-day linguistic diversity of the city lies elsewhere—in some of its least-known neighborhoods.

We’re not talking about Manhattan, which was once a multiethnic labyrinth but is now simply too expensive, though it remains a job center and playground for many better-off international students, tourists, businesspeople, cultural figures, diplomats, and various others, with their hundreds of mother tongues. The United Nations, after all, is both a global political hub and just another city neighborhood.1 The destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001 was an event of global scale and significance in part because the New Yorkers killed in the towers came from over one hundred countries and almost certainly spoke an even larger number of languages.2

But for at least the last half century, it’s the city’s outer boroughs where hundreds of language groups from around the world have carved out entire communities. This other, more radically cosmopolitan city of low-rise, working-class immigrant neighborhoods both makes Manhattan possible and stands perpetually in its shadows. It encompasses ungentrified Brooklyn south of the terminal moraine, most of the Bronx, and Staten Island north of the expressway. But nowhere on the planet, square mile after square mile, is more linguistically diverse than the borough of Queens.

In terms of what we know about its actual linguistic life, not to mention many of the individual languages spoken, Queens might as well be at the bottom of the ocean. Here speakers of languages like Trung live not eight thousand miles but a block or a subway stop away. For the last decade, since coming home from China, I have been living in one of its quieter corners—a nondescript neighborhood with an extraordinary soundtrack.

Imagine you’re on foot. On any given block, passing voices speak varieties of Polish, Ukrainian, Egyptian Arabic, Mexican Spanish, Puerto Rican Spanish, Dominican Spanish, Ecuadorian Spanish, Kichwa, and all the forms of New York City English they give rise to. I can usually pick them out, but only understand a fraction of what people are saying, depending on context, volume, and so many other factors—and you can’t learn a language by eavesdropping.

In certain stores, Albanians, Bosnians, Serbs, and Montenegrins all reunite for the immigrant hustle, speaking the languages of the former Yugoslavia as if the country still existed.3 An old Macedonian selling tchotchkes from a table on the street is a gentle bully in every language. At a grocery stocking goods from Budapest, Baku, and all points between, the owner has a favorite among the dozen sweating blocks of feta: “Romanian” sheep, which is actually made in Bulgaria by a Romanian firm the way the Bulgarians, those masters of feta, used to do it twenty years ago, he says with a faraway look in his eyes.

Some groups in the neighborhood have battled each other to the point of genocide “back home,” but here a basic neutrality and balance of power are never questioned. Everyone’s homeland is a borderland, and every group is some kind of ethnic or linguistic minority. No nationalism seems simple, no language standard, and all are to different degrees endangered here. People call themselves “Romanian Serbians” when they mean they’re from the Banat, “German Hungarians” rather than Danube Swabians, “Slovenian Germans” in case you don’t know of the Gottscheers. The “Albanian Montenegrins,” to be precise, are from the border town of Ulqin. The “Austrian Italians,” to be specific, are from Val di Non, a valley in the Dolomites.

Every group has its clubs, some more private and intimidating than others. At the Val di Non clubhouse, old ladies making doilies hold a halting conversation in Nones, a Romance language which sits somewhere between Ladin, Lombard, and Venetian.4 Partanna, Castelvetrano, and Santa Margherita di Belice are neighboring towns in western Sicily with neighboring social clubs here going back a century, where the men play cards under blasting TVs, the espresso and Sicilian flowing. At the Banatul Soccer and Folklore Club, people with roots in the Banat, a historical region now divided among Romania, Serbia, and Hungary, gather, presumably, for soccer and folklore.

Gottscheer Hall, still the focal point for an estimated eighteen thousand Gottscheers and their descendants in the New York area, now also hosts quinceañeras and house music parties along with its annual Bauernball (Farmers’ Ball). While doubling as a neighborhood bar, it’s still the headquarters for all things Gottscheer: the Blau Weiss soccer team, the annual Miss Gottscheer contest, the Relief Association, and the multiple choral groups, among other community institutions. This is the last outpost for Gottscheerish, an endangered Germanic language which developed in the isolation of the Gottschee (Kočevje) region in what is now Slovenia. Its speakers packed up seven centuries of history in about as many months, escaping in 1944 and 1945 via displaced persons camps to Germany and Austria, where people largely assimilated, or else here to Queens, where the last speakers live.5 At the Gottscheer-owned pork store nearby, a placard behind the hanging sausages says “We speak—” in fourteen languages, and they’re not counting Gottscheerish.6

Danube Swabians, another Germanic group who fled central Europe at the end of the war, gather annually at the local cemetery to commemorate their people’s Opfer der Entrechtung, Vernichtung, Verschleppung, Vertreibung, victims of expulsion, deprivation of rights, extermination, and deportation (as the memorial stone puts it in German and English). Nearby the community built a very different kind of memorial—one of the oldest soccer fields in the country, where kids born all over the world kick the same ball, as the sun goes down behind a distant skyline.7

Two-story vinyl-sided houses with aluminum awnings give little sense of the languages spoken inside. But the Black Madonna of Częstochowa stares out from a living room window, meaning Polish. The twentieth-century saint Padre Pio painted on a passing van is “a point of contact with Eternity” and a sure sign of Sicilian.8 A store selling off-brand phone chargers and cases is named for a Mauritanian province, a likely indicator of Hassaniya. The scrolling LED sign on a Tibetan momo truck flashes mandalas and hearts that transform into dancing letters, which go from blood red to icy green. The customers know what they’re getting, even if the text doesn’t fit: “CHICKEN MO. TABLE MOM. ROZEN MO.”

Even cars sport signs and symbols of allegiance. A bumper sticker in English: “I am proud to be a Coptic.” A license plate holder from the little Puerto Rican town of Toa Baja. The vanity plate BUZAU, for the medium-sized city of Buzǎu in southeastern Romania. (Unfortunately, the DMV doesn’t do diacritics.) A mini swallowtail flag hangs from a rearview mirror: blue and gold with a white crescent moon and an eight-pointed star, for the Székelys of Transylvania.

Peoples from particular places with particular histories now have their places on these particular blocks. Pointedly far from the city’s Muslim Egyptians is the Coptic block with its Coptic bodega, Coptic laundromat, Coptic print shop, and Coptic street life all centered on a Coptic church. Tahrir Square refugees pray in Coptic or play backgammon in Egyptian Arabic as their kids play freely on the sidewalk in English, the language often spoken here when parents aren’t around. Retired Gurkha soldiers shoot hoops every Sunday morning in the local park, calling for the ball in Nepali, a lingua franca for these native speakers of different dialects of Gurung and Tamang, minority languages of the mountains and the middle hills.

There is something to study here, but nothing to romanticize. Affordability, now vanishing fast, has been key. Many people stick to their own kind, at least the adults, though mostly without walls and without rancor. Historically, not all communities have been welcome. There have been Nazis, and there may be neo-Nazis now.9 For decades, white ethnic homeowners, whatever their linguistic backgrounds, resisted ethnic succession, using historic preservation and other tools to fight policies like school busing and low-income housing. Broadly speaking, there is a “Latino” side of the neighborhood and a “European” side.

But speakers of Italian “dialects” and different varieties of Spanish communicate through cognates. A retired Puerto Rican cop and a Serbian contractor see eye to eye. Roma and Romanians may meet as fellow Pentecostals. Speakers of Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian somehow communicate along the Eastern Slavic spectrum.10 People pick up bits of each other’s languages, sometimes more. Mixing, code-switching, and other ways of combining languages and dialects are lightning-speed facts of daily life. These blocks sound like nowhere else in the world.

To all these groups, “Americans” in a sense are just another little ethnic group, disproportionately twentysomething and more numerous every year. They were born in the interior, the suburbs of Ohio and Virginia and Florida which some may go back to, but in the meantime they’re here making little linkages of their own. To others looking in, the Americans have their foods, stores, and subgroups just like any other group; their tats, T-shirts, and dogs; their particular vowels.

No language group has a majority, or even 15 percent of the neighborhood, and most are at just 5 or 10 percent. No group is in control.11 Even English is a vital lingua franca, not a linguistic overlord. By and large, linguistic and cultural differences stabilize, even harmonize, the neighborhood. It can be a home for so many groups in part because it’s a homeland for none of them, no one’s turf. There is breathing room not only for national languages, but even to a degree for Indigenous, minority, and endangered languages.

A SNAPSHOT OF BABEL

My neighborhood has its signature sound, but there are several dozen across the outer boroughs that are just as diverse, each in a different way. These are the places where ELA has recorded New Yorkers speaking over a hundred languages which officially are not here, according to the census or any other dataset. Collectively, the communities that speak them comprise hundreds of thousands of individuals. Nor is this massive gap unique to New York or even the US, for no record of any city’s languages comes even close to representing everything people actually speak. Majority-language speakers either can’t find out the truth, or can’t be bothered.

Since 1890, the US Census has generally asked at least one simple question about language, which has varied over time but remained far too limited to reflect the complex and ever-evolving dynamics of migration, diaspora, and cultural change. The way the questions have been asked, and to whom and in which languages, has ensured that Indigenous, minority, and primarily oral languages are systematically undercounted, starting with the question of what even counts as a language.1 Today the question is asked only on the annual, sample-based American Community Survey, not the main decennial census, with a blank for people to fill in the non-English language they “speak at home.” Only one response is used (no room for multilingualism), and the way these are tabulated by the Census Bureau tends to lump smaller languages in with larger ones and for privacy reasons figures aren’t even published until a language reaches a certain population threshold.

To fill the gap, we launched a language census of our own at ELA. Of course languages inherently can’t be pinned to a map, but move in the mouths of their speakers or the hands of their signers. Whole communities are constantly on the move. This is true even on a daily basis if you consider the subway, the circulatory system that is also fundamentally the city’s most democratic public space. Every train on every line, to varying degrees, has at least a superficial tendency to be a kind of Noah’s ark, holding in rumbling and often garish suspension a cellular representation of humanity, or at least a single squiggly spaghetti cross section of New York. As the MTA now recognizes, certain languages may be particularly vital on certain lines—Russian on the B/Q, Haitian Creole on the 2/3, etc.—but every line spans two or three boroughs and touches on all kinds of neighborhoods, making any given train a world’s fair in motion that fragments and reconstitutes at every stop. The subway might not run throughout the world, but it can contain and display it, at all hours, for anyone who cares to see.

We didn’t attempt a subway census, but the map soon became an endless, obsessive work in progress, first in print, now a website at www.languagemap.nyc. At best it’s just a snapshot of Babel, created over five years through thousands of interviews and discussions with community leaders, speakers, and other experts. In total we have mapped over 1,200 locations, including restaurants, temples, community centers, and other significant sites across the metropolitan area, where over seven hundred languages are used—seven times the number of languages recorded by the census.2

ELA’s count makes clear that one out of every ten languages on the planet, including just about all the sizeable ones, has at least one speaker in New York. Hundreds of languages have substantial communities of hundreds if not thousands of speakers, though the reliability of community estimates varies. Nearly 40 percent of the city’s languages are from Asia, a quarter from Africa, and just under 20 percent each from Europe and the Americas, with a much smaller number from Oceania and the Pacific. Linguistically, it’s a very different city from what most people imagine.3

The language map also shows complex interaction zones, where one group settles next to, near, or after another with which it has linguistic, historical, cultural, religious, national, or other links. Speakers of Geg and Tosk Albanian may not always live side by side, but both are drawn to existing Italian areas because of their linguistic and cultural familiarity. Punjabi speakers buy homes and build businesses near speakers of Guyanese and Trinidadian creoles who may have arrived a few years earlier, united at least loosely by an Indian heritage, and this draws other South Asians in turn. Neighborhoods may be less relevant units than the countless microzones of peoples from particular towns, regions, and language groups clustering in different ways across the city’s sixty-six thousand blocks and million-plus residential buildings.

The number of “global immigrant neighborhoods” and “melting-pot census tracts” has exploded in recent decades, but monoethnic enclaves sealed off from other groups are almost nonexistent.4 In fact, the idea of the “Little [insert foreign country or city]” enclave is just as much a poorly labeled idealization, usually centered around food, as the notion of a monoethnic nation. Even in areas strongly associated with a particular group (from Manhattan’s Chinatown to Richmond Hill’s Little Guyana), the group in focus is perhaps a plurality but almost never a majority of the population, or is itself made up of speakers of many different languages.

Instead of homogenous enclaves, what ELA’s language map reveals are whole regions of the world shrunk down to the size of city neighborhoods, entire linguistic universes recreated in miniature. We will visit them over the course of this book as we meet the six speakers. In both central Queens and central Brooklyn, it will be the languages of South Asia and the Himalaya (Rasmina’s world), and then close by the communities from across the Middle East and Central Asia that form the city’s new Silk Road (which Husniya calls home). Just beyond, two other worlds collide in southern Brooklyn: the former Soviet Union reconstituted around Brighton Beach, and the fading Jewish diaspora assembled in all of its languages along Ocean Parkway (with Boris at the intersection).5 Over a hundred West African languages are concentrated in Harlem and the Bronx (where Ibrahima tirelessly promotes N’ko). Across the city there are growing clusters of Indigenous peoples speaking dozens of languages from across the Americas (including Irwin).

The map proves for the first time that hundreds of Indigenous, minority, and primarily oral languages constitute the vast majority of the city’s mother tongues.6 They are not exotic; they are integral. If not always individually, in aggregate they are a force. They have long played an outsized role in the city’s on-the-ground history, though their names are largely unknown and almost never mentioned directly. They are an indispensable lens onto the deep dynamics of immigration and diaspora, genocide and displacement, the whole tangled web of inheritances that make the city tick.

Far from straightforwardly representing either America or the world, New York is a constantly evolving collection not just of particular people, but of particular peoples from particular places, often most clearly identified by their languages. With few exceptions, linguistic, religious, ethnic, and other minorities have been overrepresented in diaspora in comparison to their home countries, for they are the ones hit hardest by conflict, catastrophe, and privation and thus impelled to leave.

It’s not necessarily the poorest and most desperate who can migrate, but time and again, arrivals in the city have been linked to distant calamities that befall specific ethnolinguistic groups and set in motion particular futures. Whether because it’s easier to reach, makes for an essential first stop, is already home to related communities, or promises long-term opportunities of its own, the city has continually served as a new home for survivors and outcasts, opportunists and adventurers, despite being in other ways “the most thrusting, heartless, and demanding environment on earth.”7 Of course it helps that the city is also a magnet pulsing with money and power, drawing all things, including the rarest and most precious, into its vortex.

The archetypal New Yorker is neither an artist nor an actor nor a banker, but a working-class, multilingual immigrant.8 Close to 40 percent of New Yorkers were born in another country, a figure that is only slightly lower than it was a century ago. Numerically, they form the largest foreign-born population of any metropolitan area in the world.9 Around half of all New Yorkers speak a language other than English at home, and many of the rest have non-English-speaking parents or grandparents.

Yet paradoxically New York is also one of the capitals of the empire of English—not only the largest English-speaking city in the world, but a preeminent center of English-language media, publishing, and entertainment. Every kind of English is also here, with much more variation than is commonly recognized. Enormous numbers of New Yorkers also speak Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese, Russian, Arabic, Bengali, and several other major languages. Their importance to the sprawling story of this most multilingual of cities is undeniable but comparatively better documented, and so not in focus here.

Before any of this was here, the whole region spoke Lenape. Among the earliest settlers were Frisian and Flemish speakers, while Fulani and Fujianese speakers are among the most recent. To label these groups only as Dutch, Belgian, Guinean, or Chinese is to miss who they are and where they’re coming from, as well what happens when they get here. Nor does language simply reveal more precisely the set-in-stone ethnicity of a speaker or community. Linguistic differences may become more meaningful, not less, through all the interactions of urban life.

Deep linguistic diversity is among the least explored factors in New York’s history and makeup. It could be argued that the disproportionate presence of historically oppressed and marginalized groups speaking less common languages quietly informs many of the city’s most distinctive political, cultural, and economic arrangements.10 It is also part of the city’s soul, explaining its particular capacity for tolerance and ability to “make room” for others, however fraught and grudging, given long histories of segregation and a thousand local flavors of racism.

All cities, to different degrees, are defined by linguistic diversity. Throughout history, there have been many Babels besides Babylon, but few have left any trace. Imperial Rome must have had speakers, if not whole neighborhoods, of Oscan, Umbrian, Etruscan, and later Visigoth, Ostrogoth, and other languages now unremembered. Tang-dynasty Chang’an (today’s Xi’an) must have teemed with speakers of Sogdian, Salar, Tangut, and others from across Eurasia. Chroniclers of Ottoman Istanbul and Mughal Delhi noted the presence of many different peoples, but no one listened to their languages, probably because (much as today) the unwritten held little interest for writers.

Past Babels faded unrecorded, but we should listen to the ones emerging today. They are the most diverse in history, the first with a truly global reach. Many are also outcomes of empire, where the rallying cry “We are here because you were there” rings with particular force.11 Because of ELA, New York’s is now by far the best documented, but every Babel has a dynamic all its own. Colonial history explains why Paris is now home to so many languages of Southeast Asia and West Africa, not to mention Saramaccan from French Guiana, Réunion Creole, and Indigenous Kanak languages of New Caledonia.12 Today’s London is powered by peoples of South Asia, the Caribbean, and Eastern and Southern Africa.13 Moscow, just beneath the surface, is an unparalleled magnet for speakers of Caucasian, Central Asian, and Siberian languages.

Decolonization, in all its piecemeal chaos, made the metropoles’ metropolises themselves into mini empires, reversing the flow of peoples while at the same time doubling down on colonial power dynamics. Migration policies may have left the door ajar, but the oncecolonized pushed it open by mastering French, English, and Russian.14 In time this led other, unrelated layers to develop: Tibetans and Wenzhounese in Paris, Brazilians and Lithuanians in London.

Linguistically diverse Dubai is a revolving door of mercilessly stratified peoples.15 In Geneva, it’s packed into Les Pâquis: Galician and Portuguese social clubs, Ethiopian and Eritrean shops, Lebanese sidewalk cafés, Thai masseuses, Romanian and Bulgarian dentists, African asylum seekers, and Balochi exiles. Hong Kong’s Babel really is a single tower.16 Toronto consists of communities from all over the world, including speakers of endangered languages like Scottish Gaelic, Sri Lankan Malay, Faetar from Italy, and Harari from Ethiopia—perhaps under less pressure to assimilate than elsewhere.17 Los Angeles holds in its suburban sprawl dozens of Indigenous languages of the Americas, together with a unique linguistic assemblage from the Asia-Pacific.

National capitals like Jakarta, Nairobi, and Port Moresby have their own distinctive linguistic ecologies, differently constructed but no less extraordinary. Especially important, diverse, and challenging because of their proximity to remaining Indigenous lands are regional hubs like Anchorage, Alaska; Darwin, Australia; and São Gabriel da Cachoeira in the Brazilian Amazon.18 There are also smaller Babels like Manchester and Graz, where careful work by linguists has found much more than at first meets the ear.19

Likewise, for one reason or another, many US states, towns, and cities not known for their diversity also serve as vital, substantial diaspora capitals for certain endangered language communities: the Kurds of Nashville, the Hawaiians of Las Vegas, the Tai Dam of central Iowa, the Arbëresh of Sacramento, the Micronesians of Arkansas, the Zomi of Tulsa, the Karen of Utica, and the Somali Bantus of Lewiston, Maine, among many others in an unsung but expanding and very American archipelago of refuge.20

Yet, for all these examples, there are no linguistic histories or portraits of any city. In the stories we tell about cities, the total, unconscious focus on the usual dominant languages needs undoing. The story of a city’s least-known languages is also the story of its forgotten peoples, told in their own words (in translation where needed). One problem is an overreliance on written sources, which tend to be in the same few languages. We need to read those sources against the grain but more importantly listen to speakers of the other, mostly oral languages. A second challenge is that linguistic minorities, especially in urban centers, often seem to be rapidly subsumed into larger national, panethnic, or racial groupings, hiding the linguistic diversity within those.21

Just as confounding are the ways that cities can be crucibles of glorious and intensive contact and mixing, where new linguistic and cultural composites form, or sites of rediscovery, where people learn lost family languages as adults and language movements take wing. Contemporary sign languages in particular have often grown and flourished in cities, where a critical mass of Deaf people can gather at schools and clubs. Some endangered languages may even thrive, under certain circumstances, in the eye of the urban storm.

Today smaller languages will have to survive in urban environments—where a majority of humans, including in many places a majority of Indigenous people, now live22—if they are going to survive at all. Yet cities can be like sieves through which languages are continually running.23 More than ever, cities depend on diversity but swallow it up and spit out a monoculture. Without continuous infusions of new speakers, few immigrant languages typically make it beyond the third generation. Now threats to immigration and immigrant lives, language loss in the homelands, and the gentrification of cities appear to be accelerating the cycle. A city like New York can be a haven but also an endpoint, a “Babel in reverse” metabolizing the languages and cultures of the world until none are left.

A BRIEF GUIDE TORADICAL LINGUISTICS

The baseless and pernicious myth of Babel in Genesis 11 suggests that linguistic diversity is nothing but confusion, divine punishment for the urban hubris that dared build a tower to reach the heavens. But in Genesis 10, the world was already diverse, with the descendants of Noah listed in a dazzling genealogy seventy names long as the world’s original nations, each with its own language— (ish lilshono) or every one after his tongue, as the King James Version has it. Even earlier in Genesis 6–9, Noah himself was commanded to safeguard the world’s biodiversity in an ark.

In many traditions, linguistic diversity is recognized as primordial and essential. In most of the world, multilingualism has been the historic norm. How we speak is the essence of where we come from, the grounding of self which enables us to connect with other, different selves.1 More than race or religion, language is a window onto the deepest levels of human diversity. The ubiquitous map of the world’s approximately two hundred nation-states is recent and superficial compared to the little-known map of its seven thousand languages. Borrowing, code-switching, mixing, hybridization, creolization, and language shift are all processes which attest to the fluidity of communication, but the core vocabulary of any given language can usually be traced back several millennia.

At the heart of linguistics itself is a radical premise: all languages are cognitively and communicatively equal. Language is a universal and democratic fact cutting across all human societies: no human group is without it, and no language is superior to any other. Some languages may specialize in talking about melancholy, or seaweed, or atomic structure; some grammars may glory in conjugating verbs while others bristle with syntactic invention. Languages represent thousands of natural experiments: ways of seeing, understanding, and living that should rightly form a major part of any meaningful account of what it is to be human.

We are talking about languages, not “just dialects.” Linguists use the criterion of mutual intelligibility, meaning that under normal circumstances a distinct language cannot be understood by speakers of any other language.2 But in popular parlance there is often something irreducibly political at work with these terms, as captured by the famous Yiddish phrase spoken by an unknown Bronx teacher: (A shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un a flot): A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.3 Indeed, “dialect” is now such a loaded and unhelpful term that linguists prefer to talk more neutrally about “language varieties,” as we will here.4

Users of Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Mandarin, English, and the like have continually proclaimed their languages holier, more perfect, or more adaptive than the unwritten, unstandardized “dialects” they look down on. But from a linguistic point of view, no language as used by a native speaker is in any way inferior, let alone broken. The vast majority have always been oral, with written language a derivative of comparatively recent vintage, confined to tiny elites in a small number of highly centralized societies. Writing is palpably a trained technology of conscious coding, in comparison to the deeply natural and universal human behaviors of speaking and signing.