‘A rich reflection of humanity’: Mapping the 700 languages spoken in New York

By Barbara Spindel

New York has always been a city of superlatives, and here’s a good one: It’s the most linguistically diverse city not just in the world, but in the history of the world. So says linguist Ross Perlin in his revelatory new book, “Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York.”

Perlin is co-director of the Manhattan-based Endangered Language Alliance, which both documents the city’s embattled languages and provides support for its vast linguistic diversity. (The ELA’s ambitious mapping project has found more than 700 languages spoken in the metropolitan area.) In addition to tracing Gotham’s linguistic history and explaining the painstaking work of language documentation, “Language City” profiles six remarkable New Yorkers working with the nonprofit to preserve their mother tongues, from Lenape and Yiddish to the less well-known Wakhi and Nahuatl.

As a result of shifting global migration patterns, Perlin writes, “far from being confined to remote islands, towering mountains, or impenetrable jungles,” many speakers of endangered languages are “now right next door, though to majority groups they remain invisible and their words inaudible.”

“Language City” will change the way you see — and hear — New York. Brooklyn Magazine spoke to Perlin on the eve of the book’s publication.

Can you give us an overview of the city’s rare and endangered languages?
People have long known that New York is deeply diverse and that all these major national languages were here, but the realization behind the ELA was that there were also many languages with very small numbers of speakers. We’ve done some work with Native American languages, including Lenape, the original language of this place, which is highly endangered as well. But for the most part, we’re talking about immigrant diaspora languages, people coming from language hotspots in different parts of the world that have now also become sending areas of immigration: places like the Himalayas, West Africa, parts of Mexico and Guatemala, the Andes, parts of Southeast Asia.

How do languages become endangered in the first place?
There are many reasons, generally having to do with marginalization, colonialism or national imperatives to speak a standard language. New technologies and education systems have also played a role. Many of the languages are already highly endangered when the speakers come here, and the speakers themselves usually speak many languages. But we’re talking here about their mother tongues, which in many cases they have few chances to use. They’ve already been under a lot of pressure to shift to larger languages. So New York is in this amazing and privileged position of receiving what we’ve now mapped as over 700 different languages, which is around 10 percent of the world’s total and includes hundreds of minority, indigenous and endangered languages in addition to all the major languages. They’re here and they could use some support.

It’s jarring to read that without continuous infusions of new speakers, few immigrant languages survive beyond the third generation. It must be hard to preserve and pass on a language while also assimilating enough to apply for jobs and speak with doctors and things like that.
Nobody is disputing the value of knowing English in New York City — or indeed of knowing Spanish or Mandarin or Bengali or Russian, depending on where you are. Those are often the lingua franca of particular neighborhoods in Brooklyn. So if you’re moving into one of those areas, it’s important to know that lingua franca. The more multilingualism the better.

But people should have spaces where they can use their mother tongues. They shouldn’t be told, as so many are, that their mother tongue is worthless, it’s just a dialect, it’s not written so it can’t be valuable. From a linguistic point of view, every language is cognitively and communicatively equal. The linguistic diversity that people are bringing here is such a rich reflection of humanity.


This relates to your idea of language justice. You say we should build a linguistic infrastructure, perhaps with English, Chinese and Spanish as common languages but with information in every mother tongue. How do you envision that working in such a diverse city?
We’re already in the middle of the experiment in some ways. New York is further along than almost anywhere and has come a long way in the last two decades in terms of having better language access and interpretation services, especially in settings like hospitals and courts and prisons, where it can be a life-or-death situation. Just seeing signs in Haitian Creole on the subway or the Department of Sanitation putting out a message in Bengali — meaningful things are happening in the ten or so large citywide languages that are spoken by over 100,000 New Yorkers each.

These are cities within cities, all overlapping. The question becomes how that can be improved and deepened and how we can dynamically recognize changes in linguistic diversity as they happen. It’s not that we need subway announcements in 700 languages, but it’s about a thoughtful recognition of our place as this extraordinarily diverse metropolis with a historic opportunity to chart a course as a haven for endangered languages.

What about on an individual level? You note that people intensely aware of their race or gender privilege rarely consider their linguistic privilege.
I hope “Language City” will encourage New Yorkers to listen more carefully to their neighborhoods, not to judge other accents or dialects as somehow broken or inferior, to realize that standardized varieties, like the kind of English often taught in our schools or even the kind of Spanish taught in our schools, is actually not the way that people speak across a wide spectrum in New York. It’s fine to teach those standards, but we should respect all the ways people speak. We usually can understand each other, and those differences should be celebrated.

Queens is the city’s most linguistically diverse borough, but Brooklyn can’t be far behind.
Brooklyn is a big part of the story. People always talk about Jackson Heights, but they don’t talk about Bensonhurst or the central and southern parts of Brooklyn that are every bit as diverse as those parts of Queens. And in terms of foreign-born population, which is one easy metric, Brooklyn is right there with Queens.

I’ve lived in Kensington for 20 years.
So then you know it. Kensington is a paradigm case. I’d say that the whole southern half of Brooklyn and the western half of Queens have been the places that have drawn the largest numbers of immigrants over recent decades and the greatest degree of linguistic diversity.

How did that happen?
There are so many reasons why different groups settle in certain areas, but the key with Brooklyn and Queens has been their relative affordability, their proximity to Manhattan and to work and transit, as well as something deeper about their makeup, their mix of housing, their mix of opportunities and options. Many areas were abandoned through white flight, which created affordability in some cases, and many immigrant groups have deeply revitalized these neighborhoods. With Queens it’s been a fascinating transformation from an identity that had association with Archie Bunker and in a sense with Donald Trump to being the most diverse place there is.

What about the other boroughs?
Manhattan was for a long time that absolute center, a world of ethnic neighborhoods into the early 20th century, and for various reasons that has changed a great deal. Manhattan is still deeply linguistically diverse in its own way — you have to include commuters and the U.N. and tourists. The Bronx is coming on fast because of its affordability in the last 10 to 20 years. Even Staten Island, which often gets left out of the story, is deeply diverse in its northern section. Major Sri Lankan and Liberian communities, each of which speak a number of languages, are there. As they gentrify, Brooklyn and Queens are becoming more difficult for people to land in or certainly to stay in. And this is what’s leading New Jersey and Long Island and the suburbs to become more of the hubs as well.

You devote a fascinating chapter to Rasmina, whose language is only spoken in five small villages in northern Nepal. Only 700 people in the world speak Seke, and a hundred of them have lived in a single building in Brooklyn. That’s wild.
This is a vertical village, as I call it, right in the middle of Brooklyn. There are other vertical villages like it in different parts of the city, but the story of Seke is a testament to how deep the Himalayan migration is as well as to the self-organizing and tenacity of the Seke-speaking community. Rasmina found us through a chain of connections, and she’s been a collaborator with me in researching and documenting her language for a number of years.

Do you wonder if there are people and languages you could be working with that you don’t know about?
I do think about that, yeah. I hope someone will read this article or find the book and approach us. I don’t doubt that there are many languages and many speakers that we have not been able to connect with. We’re always trying to find people and make ourselves able to be found.

I wanted to talk about Yiddish, which presents a special case. It’s a vanishing language that’s now being revived among Hasidic Jews in Williamsburg and Borough Park. So it’s growing, but within a separatist enclave.
It is a sort of success case, a fascinating developing case of a language which is now going into its fourth or fifth generation in Brooklyn and where Brooklyn is arguably its world center. The Hasidic story itself is remarkable and rhymes in some ways with many stories in the city. The community was largely composed of survivors of the Holocaust. They came to a city that had this illustrious Yiddish history but where the vast majority of speakers had shifted already to English. There was a determination not to let that happen, to continue using Yiddish in all aspects of daily life in the Hasidic community.

Is their Yiddish different from the Yiddish of the past?
It’s different in some ways because of the areas that the Hasidic have come from. A lot of Yiddish speakers who were coming to New York before were from what was then the Russian Empire, further east, what’s now Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania. The Hasidic varieties are coming out of the southern parts of the Yiddish-speaking world — parts of Hungary, Poland, Romania. And then you add to that differences between religious and secular life and the fundamental multilingualism of Hasidic life, with English for the outside world but also intensive use of Hebrew and Aramaic for religious purposes. They’re almost creating a new language, a kind of Hasidic Yiddish.

I figured it must be different from the Yiddish I learned from my older relatives, which was mostly jokes and insults.
That’s what got left, these funny words and terms popularized by entertainers. The language in so many families became reduced to punchlines or these very pungent, beautiful words. The fact that they were part of a whole language system with literature and theater — all that was kind of lost.

You profile a woman named Karen who used to drive 10 hours from Ontario to teach Lenape in Manhattan once a month but has died. Does that mean there’s no more Lenape instruction happening in the city now?
As far as I know, there’s no one teaching Lenape in the city since Karen passed away over a year ago. That was a pretty heroic effort on her part to bring the language here. There is an increasing Lenape presence here, however. Karen’s legacy and the legacy of other teachers have led to this growing revitalization movement across a far-flung Lenape diaspora, which has now in some meaningful ways come to New York City, as it should.

You write about the challenges involved in recovering disappearing languages. What does this work feel like?
The work feels deeply personal and is deeply relational. There are people who say, well, there’s AI or other technologies, or something external like books or archives, that will save a language. But in so many cases it’s about finding one person who will be a keeper of a language, who will pass it on, who has devoted the time and the care to work on something that may not have the most practical importance for others but is a deeply held commitment and a continuity for a culture.

It’s amazing how in a lot of cases it comes down to one person’s efforts.
A single speaker can make a huge difference, a single teacher. In small language communities, every person really counts. It’s almost hard for speakers of larger languages to imagine — you take it for granted that there are another billion people to carry on English.