Language City

Starred review from November 13, 2023
As home to more than 700 languages, New York is “the most linguistically diverse city in the history of the world,” writes Perlin (Intern Nation), codirector of the nonprofit Endangered Language Alliance, in this enthralling account of his attempts to document dozens of the rarest languages that have flourished there. He profiles six individuals in Brooklyn and Queens who speak an endangered tongue, among them Rasmina, who lives in a “vertical village” (a six-story apartment building) of some 700 Seke speakers that hail from five towns in northern Nepal. She is working to transcribe and preserve the language, even as the residents transition to speaking the more common Nepali of their neighbors. Other languages featured are Wakhi, which originates from the area where Tajikistan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and China converge; Nahuatl, which is spoken in remote areas of Mexico; and several West African languages that are being newly transcribed by the unifying N’ko alphabet. Perlin uses language as a window into N.Y.C. history, with engrossing deep dives into, for example, the “Harlemese” of the 1920s (sometimes called “jive”) that was influenced by several Black immigrant groups, elements of which quickly caught on around the world. The result is an immersive meander through N.Y.C.’s past and present that brings to the fore its multitudinous nature. Readers will be engrossed.

January 1, 2024
Perlin (Intern Nation, 2012) is a linguist, translator, and co-director of the Endangered Language Association. This fascinating book for language buffs delves into the past, present, and future of languages in New York City, one of the planet's most linguistically diverse places. The Lenape people were early inhabitants. Their name for a hickory grove, "the place where we get bows," was transliterated to Manhattan by Dutch settlers. Sojourner Truth, a formidable orator in English whose first language was Dutch, lived among Creole speakers. New Amsterdam was cosmopolitan. New York stayed cosmopolitan: iron workers speak Mohawk, Copts pray in the language of pharaohs, and Nepalese residents speak Seke. Speakers of Wakhi, Nahuatl, and Yiddish call New York home--sometimes representing the world's highest concentration of speakers of those languages. Perlin identifies these communities as arks for endangered languages and concludes with a powerful section profiling "language keepers" like Karen, a woman who has returned to New York City following her ancestors' forced migration, to teach the Lenape language.

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November 15, 2023
A spirited celebration of a polyglot city. Linguist Perlin, co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance and author of Intern Nation, makes a strong case for the need to support endangered, Indigenous, and primarily oral languages. Of more than 7,000 languages, he reports, more than half are likely to disappear over the next few centuries. Many survive in New York City, which the author portrays with abundant evidence as a city "of unprecedented linguistic diversity." Besides offering an overview of New York's linguistic history, Perlin follows dedicated, impassioned speakers of endangered languages from Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas who are each "trying to maintain or revitalize their languages" by compiling dictionaries, transcribing and translating recorded texts, and popularizing linguistic and cultural traditions. Among some 700 Seke speakers, for example, originally from five villages in the Mustang region of northern Nepal, more than 100 live (or have lived) in an apartment building in Brooklyn. For the last three years, Perlin has met regularly with one of them, either in Brooklyn or at ELA's office, "gradually adding words, definitions, and examples to a dictionary-in-progress; homing in on single points of grammar; or carefully transcribing and translating a previously recorded text." The other languages the author examines are Yiddish, now spoken mainly by Hasidim; Nahuatl, once the lingua franca of Mexico, with "a long and extraordinary history as a written language"; Wakhi, "an endangered Pamiri language spoken by around forty thousand people in the remote high mountain region where Tajikistan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and China converge"; N'ko, a writing system created in West Africa in 1949 that "unites Manding-language speakers from what is today Guinea, Mali, and Ivory Coast" and that has since spread globally; and Lenape, the language of Indigenous tribes in Manhattan. New York's cultural richness, Perlin asserts, is nourished by languages. A convincing argument for linguistic multiplicity.

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April 12, 2024

Linguist/translator Perlin (Intern Nation: How To Learn Nothing and Earn Little in the Brave New Economy) is the codirector of the Manhattan Endangered Language Alliance. A born-and-raised New Yorker, he recounts efforts (by his organization and by everyday New Yorkers) to conserve and maintain six endangered languages and to pass them and their cultural significance on to future generations. Among these languages is Lenape, the language of the New York area's original Indigenous inhabitants, who called Manhattan "Manahatta," which means hilly island. For this book, Perlin found only one fluent speaker of Lenape in the city today, but a few others are trying to revive it. Perlin also talks to speakers of Yiddish, the lingua franca of the Lower East Side; Wakhi, spoken today in Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, and China; Nahuatl, part of a group of Uto-Aztecan languages spoken by some in Mexico; Seke, one of the Indigenous languages of Nepal; and N'Ko, a West African writing system that's taught in some schools in the Bronx and Harlem. The book includes examples of different sentence structures from these languages, discusses their sounds, and recounts their histories. VERDICT An in-depth, fascinating analysis of endangered languages and efforts to preserve them in New York City. Give to readers who enjoyed John McWhorter's Words on the Move.--Claude Ury

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