Ross Perlin, Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York (2024)

About 700 languages are spoken in New York, some of them at risk of extinction. How many can one linguist work to preserve?

If you want to learn a language, move to New York. It doesn't really matter what language you want to learn: with its nearly 40-percent foreign-born population, it's now "the most linguistically diverse city in the history of the world," home to over 700 of them. So writes linguist and New Yorker Ross Perlin in his book Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York. If you do make such a move, you could do worse than following his example and living in Queens, since "nowhere on the planet, square mile after square mile, is more linguistically diverse." This was heartening for me to read, since I've long imagined that Queens would be my own most viable New York option, given the cost of Manhattan and Brooklyn. I still recall a good Dominican breakfast I had the one time I stayed there.

Whether I ordered that breakfast in Spanish doesn't come back to mind. Not that I would have had to go to New York to do so, Spanish being a practicable language in more than a few regions of the United States — and, in any case, not one especially relevant to Perlin's project. The core chapters of this book deal with Seke, Wakhi, Yiddish, N'Ko (technically a writing system), Nahuatl, and Lenape, some of whose names may not ring a bell even for serious linguaphiles. But linguaphiles don't come much more serious than Perlin, who in college "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," a desire that led him to a six-month immersion sojourn in Beijing.

There he discovered that China has about 300 languages apart from Mandarin, many of them officially endangered. This inspired him to return a few years later to do PhD fieldwork on Trung, spoken by fewer than 7,000 people "literally at the end of the road, on China’s remote border with Tibet and a breakaway part of Myanmar." This was a work of scholarship, but also of preservation, performed in the awareness that "a world was slipping away even faster than the words that referred to it." He's continued to fight the good fight, for Trung and a host of other languages besides, in his capacity as co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance (ELA) in New York, "the only organization anywhere focused on the linguistic diversity of cities, and especially on endangered, Indigenous, and primarily oral languages."

I wouldn't say that Language City is advertisement for the ELA, nor would I say that it isn't an advertisement for the ELA, exactly. Perlin emphasizes its scrappy, near-Quixotic perseverance, and his involvement there seems to have brought him into contact with the speakers of the six particular languages he profiles in the book. Most are polyglot immigrants in a city (or rather an urbanized region, extending out to the New Jersey suburbs) of polyglot immigrants. In Perlin's New York, a single square mile contains "a Ghanaian evangelical church, a Russian banya, a florist/bar for hipsters, a Juhuri-speaking synagogue for the Jews of Azerbaijan and Daghestan, Dominican hair salons, Pakistani auto body shops, Haitian dollar-van stops, an organization of Darfuri refugees, a Cambodian Buddhist wat, an Albanian mosque, a Panamanian bar, and a restaurant where Uzbek Uber drivers swig bottles of Jameson while savoring fine kebabs."

This image appeals to me, not least in its promise of the world in microcosm, something writers have been trying to see in New York and certain other world capitals for at least a century. Perlin cites the intriguing example of Around the World in New York, whose author Konrad Bercovici ("himself a polyglot Romanian Jewish immigrant") delivers a paean to a city in which residents belonging to the same foreign culture not only "live in the same neighborhood, but they lead the same lives, sing their own songs, and speak their own tongue." This may have been on the wishful side even at the time, but the very year Bercovici's book was published, the national-origins quotas and other restrictions of the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924 effectively put an end to the booming immigrant influx of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth.

"Cut off from the source, languages and cultures withered in an atmosphere that increasingly promoted assimilation to white American norms, allowing at most for pride in certain countries, provided they were on friendly terms with the United States," Perlin writes. By 1970, New York's foreign-born population was less than 20 percent of the total. (How this shaped New York movies of the seventies, by far that city's most vital cinematic decade, is a subject for another study.) That was a lagging indicator, the doors having been flung wide open again five years before by the Hart-Celler Immigration Act of 1965. "Over the following half century, what had been true of European New York — not only the presence of every major group but also, disproportionately, of certain linguistic minorities — would become true of Latin American New York, Asian New York, Caribbean New York, and African New York."

The modern Babel that resulted, host to many languages and even some on the verge of extinction, is also, in Perlin's view, now existentially threatened itself. He gestures toward the "fiercely anti-immigrant politics" behind "the rise of Donald Trump, a Queens-born grandson of immigrants whose administration tried a host of measures, including over four hundred executive orders, to roll back the world that 1965 made." Though Language City was published before the 2024 presidential election, Perlin writes its conclusion as if steeling himself for the very outcome he fears, or at least for a continuation of its underlying sociopolitical trends. He may believe in "language justice," which regards provisions like "phone tree or touch screen options that start by asking your language" as something close to a human right, but the stripe of Americans who react apoplectically when asked to "press one for English" seems to be in the ascendant.

Not that those Americans are, in the main, New Yorkers themselves. In a footnote, Perlin quotes historian Thomas Bender's observation that "the outlook associated with New York's cosmopolitan experience has been unable to establish itself as an American standard." In every respect, New York is an exceptional American city, not an exemplary one, wield though it does outsized national influence as a media capital. Though I haven't lived in the U.S. for some time now, I don't think I'm wrong in sensing a certain superciliousness in the New York-centered media's coverage of phenomena like the recent controversy over the high volume of Haitian immigration into the small town of Springfield, Ohio. Oh, those benighted non-cosmopolitans getting worked up over a few desperate, hardworking new arrivals, if not in Springfield itself then twisting the story to their xenophobic purposes elsewhere — don't they know they're living in a nation of immigrants?

As I've often found myself explaining here in Korea, the conception of the U.S. as a "nation of immigrants" is held rather more dear in the wider world than in the U.S. itself. Ask a cross-section of Americans to list the defining characteristics their country, and I'd wager that few, even among the non-Trump-voters, would include its immigration policy in their top ten. As for the Trump-voters, I hesitate to ascribe whatever anti-immigration sentiments they harbor to pure bigotry. "Trumpism" may be too incoherent to define as an ideology, but it does seem clear that its popularity derives at least in part from what I once read memorably described as frustration with the U.S.' entanglements beyond its borders — ingress of apparently unassimilable immigrants, yes, but also prolonged foreign wars and unfavorable (or seemingly unfavorable) trade deals — given that things don't feel like they're going particularly well at home.

Regarding one's own country as "of immigrants" isn't an idea that can gain much traction on ordinary thought. Nor are the precepts of what Perlin calls "radical linguistics," or indeed of non-radical linguistics: that "all languages are cognitively and communicatively equal," or that "no language as used by a native speaker is in any way inferior, let alone broken." If linguistics refuses to distinguish between good and bad language, I've often joked, then so much the worse for linguistics. Yet it isn't hard to understand the intellectual load such assumptions bear, even if they do occasionally lead their believers to waste their time in bitter prescriptivist-descriptivist clashes (in which the prescriptivists often turn out to be phantoms conjured up in a fury of descriptivist self-justification), excuse even the most brazen sloppiness as "semantic drift," or lavish hyperbolic-sounding praise on any language or language-related practice that appears minor, powerless, or oppressed.

If I give linguistics a hard time, it's only because I'm interested in language. Indeed, it would be hard for me not to like Perlin's book, though language interests me from a different angle than it does him. In his academic field, he's made accomplishments that I'd never even dream of attempting, and nobody could accuse him of conducting his career from his armchair. Not only does he put in the hours with his subjects in New York, he also takes some of them all the way back to their homelands, where he shoots the videos of locals speaking their language (or languages) that end up on ELA's Youtube channel. These places, economically agricultural and geographically remote even within Nepal, Tajikistan, or Ontario, don't appear to have much of a future; one the five Seke-speaking villages in existence seems mostly to have emigrated to a single apartment building in Flatbush.

It occurs to me that, on the list of factors that put a language at risk of endangerment, not having developed an urban civilization must come high. Perlin offers an approximate figure of 7,000 languages currently spoken in the world, adding that "up to half are likely to disappear over the next few centuries"; none of the languages in that unfortunate half, I would venture, is the lingua franca of any world capital. Having cultivated my own interests in language and cities at about the same time — and consequently being unable to separate one from the other — I've never really been able to get exercised about the prospect of language extinction per se. When the news breaks that some last native speaker or other has died, I'd hardly say that I like it, but nor does it keep me up at night.

Aside from the Korean I speak every day, most of my linguistic interest has been drawn by the likes of French, Spanish, and Mandarin: "killer languages," as Perlin mentions they're sometimes called. Add to that my study of Japanese and Latin, and I would seem to have a taste for the imperial, or at least the formerly imperial. Given that, one might imagine me welcoming the prospect of my native English overtaking the whole world, when nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, it pleases very much indeed to read Perlin report that, in Queens, "English is a vital lingua franca, not a linguistic overlord," and I even take a kind of pleasure in his prediction that "someday English, too, will be down to its last speaker" — surprising for a writer who primarily uses English, I admit, but then, language inspires complex and contradictory feelings.

When I moved to Los Angeles, the first major city in which I'd lived as an adult, the choice had much to with the languages I could hear and speak there. Indeed, holding "in its suburban sprawl dozens of Indigenous languages of the Americas, together with a unique linguistic assemblage from the Asia-Pacific," it could easily inspire its own Language City. ("Welcome to Los Angeles, the City That's a World in Itself," said a banner I remember hanging at LAX, an example of unusually plausible boosterism.) But as Perlin sees it, "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": tantamount, I would say, to total cultural loss. Could New York could become "a 'Babel in reverse' metabolizing the languages and cultures of the world until none are left"?

Maybe so, assuming everyone moves to New York, as Perlin's interviewees can give the impression that everyone wants to. (This flatters the American delusion of universal desire to live in the U.S. — which, like most American delusions, has a basis in fact.) Ibrahima, the middle-aged Guinean promoter of N'Ko script recalls his days of longing, shopping for James Brown and Michael Jackson tapes while working in Saudi Arabia; possessed of "the strength of a hundred inspiring TED talks," Husniya, the thirty-something Tajik woman with whom Perlin works on Wakhi dreams of going on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. It's dispiriting when people from distant lands turn out to revere American popular culture of this kind, especially since Perlin underscores their intelligence. (English is the would-be Ellen guest's ninth language.) One can't help but ponder the severity of the brain drain that must be afflicting the places from which they came.

"They’re trying to forget it, because they don’t need it," Husniya says of her Wakhi-speaking compatriots. "But now someone in the U.S. is learning that? It’s like they must have nothing else to do!" Perlin's other interviewees display their own attitudes of tempest-tossed immigrant pragmatism, now slightly tempered by having come to value their native tongues after settling in New York. (The non-immigrant exception is Karen, a speaker of the Native American Lenape language who commutes from Ontario to Manhattan to teach it.) Some even bring family over, with varying results: Husniya's grandmother is "disgusted by all the food except cheeseburgers and fries" and "just wants get back to the apartment and watch the new fifty-five-inch TV with all the Russian channels." Nearly everyone can easily get media from back home, a theoretical positive for language preservation, but one that certainly complicates the process we once knew as assimilation.

The current rate of language loss, according to the Catalogue of Endangered Languages, is one every three months. It could be slowed by encouraging New York to become the city Perlin imagines, "where there is space for smaller languages to thrive in homes and community contexts. Where speakers of every language have access to the information and interpretation they need. Where multilingualism is a priority, and everyone has the options and resources to maintain and develop their ancestral and community languages, not to mention learning new ones." But it could also be slowed by encouraging the development of prosperous centers of urban civilization in as many different linguistic territories of the world as possible. Perlin quotes the old line, Yiddish in origin, about how a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. But what any language really needs to ensure its survival is its own New York.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His current projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.