Can We Talk!

The inhabitants of Earth speak 7,164 languages, according to Ethnologue, a database that catalogs the living languages of the world. A recent US Census recorded about a hundred of them in New York City, the most linguistically diverse city in history. The Endangered Language Alliance (ELA), a nonprofit that keeps track of the city’s languages, has found more than 700 of them and made a map of more than 1,200 places—restaurants, temples, mosques, community centers—where people speak them.

Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York by Ross Perlin, one of the ELA’s codirectors, is what might be called a “glorious mosaic” book. It brings that language map to life in an exhilarating way. To describe the mosaic of New York, you can’t go at it straight on, or you end up with a miscellany like marbles spilled across the floor. A good example of a “mosaic” book is The Gangs of New York (1928) by Herbert Asbury, which pulls the reader in with tales of old-time gang battles, goes into downtown back alleys and graveyards, introduces wild characters of various ethnicities, and brings out the mosaic as if in passing. The first important book of the genre was How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis, published in 1890, which unveiled the hard lives of New York’s poor, meanwhile describing different neighborhoods and their residents. (“Chinatown,” “The Italian in New York,” “The Street Arab,” and “Jewtown” are among its chapter titles.) Riis wrote in an era when influential members of the city’s upper class disliked immigrants and thought there were too many of them. The nativist movement in the United States got its wish in 1924 with the passing of the Johnson–Reed Immigration Act, which shut down most immigration.

The ELA revels in the diversity that has increased since the Hart–Celler Immigration Act of 1965 reopened the gates. About 40 percent of New York’s population was foreign-born in 1924, and the percentage is only slightly lower today. Perlin, a linguist and writer, celebrates the city’s myriad languages down to the smallest and least common. (The city’s only known speaker of Ikota, a Gabonese language, lives on Roosevelt Island, he says.) A language gets to be endangered through the dislocation of communities, encroachment of majority languages, and loss of native speakers. With small languages, native speakers might number in the triple or even single digits. Four percent of the world’s population speaks 96 percent of its languages, and as many as half of those may be gone in a few hundred years. Perlin’s book also looks at endangered languages from the perspective of social justice because the New Yorkers who speak them tend to be in precarious circumstances themselves.

Unexpected languages turn up all over. Daniel Kaufman, another of the ELA’s codirectors, learned some Tagalog (a language of the Philippines) from a man he played speed chess with in Washington Square Park. At the bodega across West 18th Street from the ELA’s offices in Manhattan, one of the cashiers speaks Ghale, “a little-documented language of Nepal,” and the guy behind the deli counter speaks Poqomchi’, a Mayan language from Guatemala. Of course these employees also know English; speakers of small languages become multilingual by necessity. The word “bodega” itself reveals a linguistic nest. It’s derived from the ancient Greek apotheke (storehouse) and related to the Latin apotheca (store), as well as to the French boutique, the Russian and Polish apteka, and the Italian bottega. Perlin writes that “in today’s New York, boutiques and bodegas sit side by side.”

Majority languages like English, Spanish, Cantonese, Mandarin, Arabic, Russian, Bengali, and Brazilian Portuguese could be considered the ELA’s enemies because they absorb and drive out small languages. Kichwa, a language descended from that of the ancient Incas, is the most widely spoken Indigenous language in New York. As the Inca Empire spread across parts of South America in pre-Columbian times, it drove out other languages. Now Kichwa qualifies as endangered, although 8,000 to 10,000 New Yorkers may speak it; but in a new country, parents are rarely able to pass along much of their mother tongue to their children. (I asked my dentist, who’s from Ecuador, if he spoke Kichwa or knew any Kichwa speakers. He said that when he was growing up outside Quito, he knew people who spoke only Kichwa, but in the US he seldom hears it. He remembered a few words, like chompa, which means “sweater.” I realized that unconsciously I had always pictured the ancient Incas wearing llama-wool sweaters. “Llama” is a word that comes from Quechua, a language category that includes Kichwa. There are speakers of other forms of Quechua in New York as well.)

In the Bronx and Harlem, ELA has found more than a hundred West African languages. A quarter of the languages in the city are from Africa, 40 percent from Asia. In the early 1990s refugees of the civil war in Liberia came to Staten Island, where probably all of Liberia’s seventeen languages are now spoken. In Brooklyn, hundreds of Zaghawa-speaking refugees from the 2003–2008 genocide in Darfur now occupy a lively neighborhood called Little Darfur. For some speakers of endangered languages, life itself has been precarious. In the Bronx in 2022, a fire in the nineteen-story high-rise known as Touray Tower killed seventeen people, most of them from Gambia. Most were speakers of Soninke, a small-minority language even within that country. The terrible event—eight of the victims were children—ranks as one of the deadliest fires in recent city history. Another blaze, the Happy Land Social Club fire, also in the Bronx, killed eighty-seven clubgoers, most of them Garifuna, in 1990. The Garifuna, who have emigrated from Honduras, Guatemala, and Belize, descend from escaped African slaves and Caribbean Native people. Some still speak Garifuna, a language that combines French, Spanish, English, and a now almost-vanished Native language, Arawakan.

Perlin believes in the dignity and utility of every language. He says that small, endangered languages “are fully capable of expressing anything that any other human language can express,” and that “it’s possible to say anything in any language.” I am sure this is true, but having spent some time years ago on the Oglala Sioux Reservation in South Dakota and listened to conversations in Lakota (Sioux) about fixing broken cars, I can report that the Lakota word for “carburetor” is “carburetor.” Perlin also says that all languages have the privilege of borrowing whenever necessary. A Lakota word I would like English to borrow, or borrow more often, is tiospaye. Pronounced “tee-oh-spay,” it means a person’s larger circle of family, friends, neighbors, and friendly or even not-friendly acquaintances. The tiospaye concept provides an affectionate way of thinking about people at varying radii of closeness to oneself. In a more abstract sense, the city’s languages all belong to its seven-hundred-member tiospaye of languages. (Lakota, by the way, is also endangered. My Oglala Sioux friends who spoke it were ten to fifteen years older than me and are now gone. Perlin says the only North American Indigenous languages that are not endangered are Cherokee, Diné Bizaad (Navajo), and Yup’ik, a language of the far north.)

Looking at the city from a linguistic point of view reveals facts you might otherwise not have stumbled on, such as: when Andy Warhol (né Andrew Warhola) met Pope John Paul II in 1980, he spoke to him in Ruthenian, a language of southern Poland and Slovakia, the region where the Pope and Warhol’s parents came from. Sojourner Truth, the antislavery heroine, grew up speaking Dutch; she was born in Ulster County, New York, in 1797, when it still had a Dutch presence. Yitta Schwartz, a Holocaust survivor and member of a Yiddish-speaking Hasidic community in Brooklyn, left maybe two thousand living descendants when she died in 2010 at the age of ninety-three. Maybe two thousand living descendants. The New York Times did a story about her entitled “God Said Multiply, and Did She Ever.”

Or other facts, such as: some Indigenous Ecuadorians who come to New York refer to the city as yoni, pronounced “I-OH-nee,” a word they improvised by sounding out the “I ♥ NY” slogan and reading the heart as an O. In the Philippines, 172 different languages (including Tagalog) are spoken, which may explain why about 60 percent of the national missions to the UN employ Filipino receptionists. Most Sherpas have the last name “Sherpa”; the Sherpa who set the world record for the fastest ascent of Mount Everest works at a Whole Foods in Manhattan. (Perlin doesn’t say which one.) Scholars in Brooklyn who read a page of the Talmud every day need to know Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, a descendant of the language Jesus spoke. At that rate, they finish in about seven and a half years, then celebrate with other scholars in a mass gathering at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. In a mosque on East 169th Street in the Bronx, instructors teach N’ko, a writing system for African languages that may have been revealed to its inventor in a dream in 1949. According to one African creation story, the word N’ko, which means “I say” in all Manding languages, was the first word spoken on Earth.

Perlin begins the book, “Don’t ask a linguist how many languages they speak.” My guess is he speaks about a dozen. He grew up in New York City and went to Stanford, where he “tried inhaling Old Norse, Uighur, Luo, Russian, and Arabic,” “threw [him]self into Mandarin,” and then spent six months in China speaking only that language. His graduate schools included Cambridge and the School of Oriental and Asian Studies (SOAS) in London. He became interested in Trung, an endangered language of China that is spoken in a remote part of Yunnan province on the border with Tibet. For his Ph.D. in linguistics, he went to Yunnan and spent three years learning Trung, recording it, transcribing it, and making a dictionary. He says, “I have never done anything harder.”

His education also included a summer as an intern, translating Chinese for an environmental nonprofit. The experience resulted in his first book, Intern Nation: How to Learn Nothing and Earn Little in the Brave New Economy (2011), in which he objects to (among other things) how the intern system degrades work. Perlin reveres work and seems to work incredibly hard himself. The structure of Language City involves his looking more closely at six of New York’s endangered languages and getting to know a speaker of each. He gives each language and its speaker a full chapter and sometimes takes long, grueling journeys to the home countries of his subjects. In the process he learns some of the languages well enough to do interviews in them.

His first subject, a young nurse from Brooklyn named Rasmina (he doesn’t give last names), speaks Seke, a language found in villages in the Mustang region of Nepal, in the lower Himalayas. More speakers of Seke now live in a single apartment building in Flatbush than remain in any of the home villages. One summer Perlin, Rasmina, and a videographer go to what he calls “Seke country.” Just getting there from New York takes twenty hours of flying to Kathmandu, almost a week of dealing with the local bureaucracy, and a long trek into the mountains by road. A densely laid out Seke village they visit is centuries old and “largely abandoned.” The villagers complain that they are neglected by their government and feel generally looked down upon. They want people who move away to send their earnings to the village, and they tell him and Rasmina that if Seke dies they won’t know what to say when people ask them who they are.

In all these linguistic quests a mournfulness and sense of loss creep in. Perlin’s second subject, Husniya, is a young woman from the part of Central Asia where Tajikistan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and China meet. She grew up speaking X̌ik, also called Wakhi, a language mentioned by Marco Polo. Today Wakhi is down to 40,000 speakers. Growing up in Tajikistan she also learned Tajik, Kyrgyz, Persian, and Russian. After immigrating to New York she got her master’s degree in early childhood education, for which she needed her ninth language, English. She is sad that today she speaks with an accent in all her languages, even Wakhi. On another hard trip, Perlin accompanies her to Tajikistan, travels the country by jeep, risks attack from ISIS on unfrequented roads, and interviews native speakers of a dozen different endangered languages.

Subject three, a critic and writer in Brooklyn named Boris, works in Yiddish and often purses his lips in resignation at its drastic decline. Boris collaborated on a Yiddish musical that had its premiere in Birobidzhan, the nominally Jewish state in Siberia that was established in the 1930s by Stalin. (I’ve been to Birobidzhan, and it couldn’t be more off-Broadway.) Perlin has somehow already been there and thankfully doesn’t have to go again. He also already knows Yiddish. It was the language of his great-grandparents, all eight of them immigrants, but he learned it only in his twenties. He admires Boris for his doggedness. There were about 10 million Yiddish speakers a hundred years ago, but because of the Holocaust and the adoption of Hebrew in Israel, the global number is now in the hundreds of thousands, most of them in Hasidic communities.

Ibrahima, the fourth subject, is one of the N’ko instructors in the Bronx. Sometimes he goes back to Kiniebakoro, the village he came from in Guinea. He wants to divide his time between Africa and the US while promoting the use of N’ko script in both places. He regrets that his children, thoroughly Americanized, don’t show much interest in it. (He lives in Montclair, a New Jersey suburb, as do I.)

Subject five, Irwin, speaks Nahuatl and comes from La Resurrección, a Mexican town that has existed since before the arrival of the Spanish. In the 1980s and 1990s urban growth turned the town into a suburb of Puebla, Mexico’s fourth-largest city. Nahuatl is of the Uto-Aztecan language family, which extends from El Salvador north into Idaho. The word “taco” comes from the Nahuatl tlaxcal. Irwin is a master of Nahuatl cooking, as well as a poet and an activist. New York’s food deliverers, or deliveristas, whose numbers grew to 65,000 during the pandemic, are “overwhelmingly…young Indigenous Mexican and Guatemalan men,” Perlin says. Because of their work a large number of them died of Covid-19. Irwin and the ELA sometimes translate for them and are trying to create a translators’ collective for all the city’s Indigenous-language speakers.

Lenape, the language of the people who occupied the New York archipelago before anybody, closes out Perlin’s six searches. His guide is Karen, a woman whose Lenape name, Waapeetkwuchukahkuyaxkweew, means “White Buffalo Woman.” (I had to check my spelling of the Lenape letter by letter, like a URL.) Karen is a cheerful and indefatigable teacher who also happens to be a national women’s weight lifting champion. At the end of the chapter she unexpectedly dies, defeating that attempt to bring back the language. Perlin goes up to a Lenape reserve in Canada hoping to meet Dianne Snake, an old woman who is the last native speaker. After some searching he finds her house, but she is so unwelcoming that he becomes flustered and can’t remember the Lenape he learned from Karen. They talk briefly in English before he makes his exit. Dianne Snake’s daughter tells him, “You lasted longer than the last guy…. He ended up in the pool.”

Most of the city’s endangered languages come from small and distant places; as Perlin says, “Many communities in New York have stronger connections to places five thousand miles away than to anywhere in the U.S.” These remote villages and towns “should be considered New York’s real sister cities.” One hundred eighty thousand Native Americans also now live in the city, more than on any reservation. A move of Indigenous people to cities is happening across the globe. In Canada and Australia, the urban Indigenous population is increasing much faster than the urban population in general. Perlin hopes that endangered languages from all over will survive and flourish in New York and that the city will be “a greenhouse, not a graveyard, for languages.” But a fear of the language graveyard motivates the ELA. At worst, he says, the city could become “a ‘Babel in reverse’ metabolizing the languages and cultures of the world until none are left.”

I wonder about the faraway places, like the crumbling, emptied-out Seke villages or the rural communities that Indigenous people leave. Last year there was a spill of toxic wastewater from a tailing basin at a tar sands mine near Wood Buffalo National Park, in far northern Alberta. The spill went into the Athabasca River, and the Cree First Nations people downstream did not find out about it until months later. Had they not been there, maybe nobody but the mine operators would ever have known about it. Remote places will be harder to defend if fewer people live in them. Perlin says that linguistic diversity is linked to biodiversity and that for Indigenous residents who relocate from ancestral territories, parts of their traditional languages “may feel impossible to access, from the terms for local plants and animals to all the narratives and lifeways linked to the land.” Small languages live in individual places—valleys, islands, canyons, jungles—and when a language disappears it can’t be good for the land.

The book needs an index. In the accumulation of names of languages, sometimes it’s hard to tell them apart or remember which have been mentioned already. Comprehensive indexing would have been possible because although many of the words are in alphabets other than English (Cyrillic, Greek, N’ko, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese characters), the author transliterates them to English when they first appear. What a wild, abundant list that index could have been! A glossary would have helped the reader, too. Explaining the pronunciation of the word “Nahuatl,” he says, “The last two letters add up to a voiceless alveolar lateral affricate, a single sound that’s rare outside the Americas.” I like the phrase “voiceless alveolar lateral affricate” and plan to use it next time I get a chance, but I still don’t know what that “tl” sounds like. With enthusiasts of primitive hunting techniques I have talked sometimes about the prehistoric spear-throwing tool called the “atlatl”—two voiceless alveolar lateral affricates in one six-letter word! If possible, I would like to pronounce it right.

I’m with the author as he notes the different kinds of Tatar languages in Brooklyn (where Lipka Tatars from Poland and Belarus built the first mosque in the city, on Powers Street), and I follow along as he describes parts of Queens where “every [language] group has its clubs,” such as the Val di Non Club, some of whose members speak Nones, “a Romance language which sits somewhere between Ladin, Lombard, and Venetian,” or Gottscheer Hall, “the last outpost of Gottscheerish,” a Germanic language originally from what is now Slovenia. I enjoy knowing that, in another neck of the borough, “retired Gurkha soldiers shoot hoops every Sunday morning…calling for the ball in Nepali, a lingua franca for these native speakers of different dialects of Gurung and Tamang.” And I’m with him as he talks about the mosque in the Bronx attended by the Macedonian Roma, whose language, Kalderash Vlax, is only one of several Romani languages in the city. But I have to take a breather when I learn that Ladino, a language spoken by descendants of Sephardic Jews who were expelled from Spain in 1492, sometimes also known as Judeo-Spanish, has more than seventy other names.

All this pluribus is great, but we also need the unum. Perlin asks, “Can Babel…actually work?” He wants it to and believes it does, after a fashion. He lives in Queens, the most linguistically diverse borough in this most linguistically diverse city, where “on any given block” he can hear four or five different languages, including Spanish in several dialects. That he can “only understand a fraction” of what the passersby are saying is an amazing achievement on his part. In New York, even people who were on warring sides in the places they came from seem to tolerate one another and get along. What he’s describing is a kind of utopia. He quotes a nineteenth-century Yiddish speaker who entered the US through Ellis Island and later recalled that the new arrivals were first put in lines according to language, and then each line was sent to the table where officials spoke that language. The Yiddish speaker says, “A big, strange country recognized my language that I had brought here with me from abroad as an official language. In Russia and Germany, I did not receive any such privilege.” The Ellis Island staff could interpret in the twenty most common European languages, as well as in Chinese and Arabic. That was how Babel worked back then.

Today the city’s Department of Homeless Services provides interpreters (by telephone) in more than two hundred languages. Perlin says those languages interact with and pull on one another and change in the process. He cites so-called Spanglish as an example. Even for us nonpolyglots it’s exciting to be a part of the mix. Once I was on a 6 train in the Bronx. The afternoon was hot, the AC underwhelming, and the car packed with people going home after work: guys carrying hard hats, women in nurses’ scrubs with plastic-covered IDs on lanyards. The train got to the last stop, Pelham Bay Park. Everybody stood up, eager to get off at last, but the doors didn’t open. We waited, knowing that sometimes they don’t open for fifteen seconds or so. Thirty seconds—still didn’t open. More time went by. It got hotter. The breezy El platform was just a few feet away.

More seconds, maybe a minute, and the doors still didn’t open. Then a woman standing in the middle of the car, right next to a door and facing it, yelled, “Abre la FUCKING puerta!” and all the doors sprang open instantly, as if in obedient surprise. Everybody in the car laughed. That’s only the second time in my life that I’ve heard somebody make an entire subway-carful of people laugh. I know just a few words of Spanish, but I learned a whole unforgettable hybrid sentence that day. All of us riders, now for just one moment on the exact same page linguistically, stepped out onto the platform and continued down the stairs, still laughing. A passionate rush of New York City patriotism surged in me.

The city lives and changes while the condition of endangerment never ends. Estimates of the number of undocumented residents of New York run as high as half a million. If Donald Trump is elected and sends federal agents to round up and deport the undocumented by the millions nationwide, as he has promised to do, the effect on the world’s most linguistically diverse city, and on the country, will be too horrible to imagine.