I’ve come to love the interactive features the NY Times publishes on its website, and Alex Carp’s piece on endangered languages in New York City is a doozy, and perfect for LH. (There are archived versions here and here, but I’m afraid you only get the text, not the interactive stuff, including the audio clips.) It opens with an outline map of Manhattan with lines pointing to locations where dozens of languages are spoken, then continues:
Most people think of endangered languages as far-flung or exotic, the opposite of cosmopolitan. “You go to some distant mountain or island, and you collect stories,” the linguist Ross Perlin says, describing a typical view of how such languages are studied. But of the 700 or so speakers of Seke, most of whom can be found in a cluster of villages in Nepal, more than 150 have lived in or around two apartment buildings in Brooklyn. Bishnupriya Manipuri, a minority language of Bangladesh and India, has become a minority language of Queens.
All told, there are more endangered languages in and around New York City than have ever existed anywhere else, says Perlin, who has spent 11 years trying to document them. And because most of the world’s languages are on a path to disappear within the next century, there will likely never be this many in any single place again. […]
With Daniel Kaufman, also a linguist, Perlin directs the Endangered Language Alliance, in Manhattan. When E.L.A. was founded, in 2010, Perlin lived in the Chinese Himalayas, where he studied Trung, a language with no standard writing system, dictionary or codified grammar. (His work helped establish all three.) He spent most of his time in the valley where the largest group of remaining speakers lived; the only road in or out was impassable in winter.
After three years, Perlin returned to New York City, where he had grown up. At that time, E.L.A. conducted language surveys on foot, canvassing neighborhoods and posting fliers seeking speakers of endangered languages. Most of the work was directed by the organization’s founders: two linguists, including Kaufman, and a poet.
In 2016, E.L.A. began to map the languages spoken in the city. A vast majority were not recognized by large businesses, schools or city government. Officially, Perlin said, they were simply not there. “None of the communities with whom we planned to partner were recorded as even existing in the census,” Kaufman and Perlin later wrote.
Since their project began, Perlin and Kaufman have located speakers of more than 700 languages. Of those languages, at least 150 are listed as under significant threat in at least one of three major databases for the field. Perlin and Kaufman consider that figure to be conservative, and Perlin estimates that more than half of the languages they documented may be endangered.
A language’s endangerment is not simply a function of its size but also a measure of its relationship to the societies around it. Sheer numbers “have always mattered less than intergenerational transmission,” Perlin writes in “Language City.” Until recently, in many regions of the world, dozens of languages lived side by side, each with no more than a few thousand speakers. Gurr-goni, an Aboriginal Australian language, had long been stable with 70. A language survives, Perlin writes, by sharing life with those who speak it: “Only in the face of intense political, economic, religious or social pressures do people stop passing on their mother tongues to children.”
When Perlin visited Seke-speaking Nepali villages in 2019 and 2023, he found that many of the people he wanted to speak with had left to find work. “Whole age groups were missing,” he says. Kaufman points to Mixtec, a group of Indigenous languages spoken in south-central Mexico, with 500,000 speakers. The differences in how the language is spoken from village to village can be “bigger than you find between French and Italian,” he said. “And there are villages where there are essentially no young people.” Their children are now born elsewhere — Culiacán, Mexico City, New York, Los Angeles. “500,000 speakers can disappear in a generation.” […]
[Caption:] Perlin writes that more than 100 West African languages are spoken in Harlem and the Bronx.
When Perlin and Kaufman document a language, they work alongside native speakers to transcribe and translate video interviews that are recorded locally and during trips to a language’s home region. (Perlin and Kaufman have helped produce some of the first dictionaries and grammars of these languages.) To document Seke, for example, Perlin works with Rasmina Gurung, a 26-year-old nurse who happens to be one of the youngest Seke speakers in the world. Most Seke speakers, about 500 people, live across five neighboring villages in northern Nepal, near Tibet. Though the villages are within walking distance, each has developed its own Seke dialect. Like many of the smaller languages of “traditional face-to-face societies,” Perlin writes, Seke has no “formal, all-purpose hello,” because villagers live among the same groups of people and rarely encounter a Seke-speaking stranger. Instead, a question — Where are you going? What are you doing? — would be more common. […]
As E.L.A. produced its first language maps, the institute’s work caught the eye of Thelma Carrillo, a research scientist in the city’s Health Department. Carrillo, who is part Zapotec, was working on a Latino health initiative, but the city had what Perlin and Kaufman found to be “no basic demographic information” on New Yorkers from Indigenous communities in Latin America, even though they have been migrating here in large numbers since the 1990s.
“We found ourselves in this odd position of being a conduit between the Indigenous Latin Americans of the city and the city agencies, because other organizations that work with them see them as Mexican or Guatemalan,” Kaufman says. “We’re working with their languages, which becomes extremely important when you need to communicate something to them.”
By the start of the pandemic, the city had begun official outreach in nine Indigenous languages and recorded videos in several other endangered languages. By reaching these communities in their own languages, New York City offered what is almost certainly the first official recognition that they exist.
Still, Perlin and Kaufman are keenly aware that the corpus they are building — word by word and sometimes syllable by syllable — might someday turn out to be a kind of fossil record.
Outside of the office, Gurung mostly speaks Seke in voice notes to elders overseas or to tell her mother a secret she doesn’t want her sister to hear. On her first trip to Nepal with E.L.A., she ended every interview with the same question: “Do you think our language will survive?”
There are images with audio clips (accompanied by translations in writing) of speakers of Tlapanec, Juhuri (see this LH post), Garifuna, Cuicatec/Dbaku, Seke, Kota/Ikota (the elephant in the story Safiyatou tells also speaks French), “N’Ko” (which is, as they say, a writing system — I’m not sure what language Ibrahima Traore is speaking), Wakhi (a Pamir language that’s long fascinated me — see this post), Nahuatl, Hidatsa, Bishnupriya Manipuri, and Lummi ([xʷləmi], a dialect of North Straits Salish). I listened avidly to the clips (it was fun to hear the Persian-like nature of Juhuri), and I hope you can access them. Thanks, Eric!
A language’s endangerment is not simply a function of its size but also a measure of its relationship to the societies around it
Very true. And to the attitudes of the speakers themselves, of course. Breton, for example, was until quite recently the larger of the two surviving Brythonic languages, but intergenerational transmission dropped off a cliff after WW2. (Not helped by a deliberate French government policy of eradication, of course. At least the English were more or less indifferent to Welsh by then. Such benign neglect would have been a step up in France.)
Igbo seems to be a rather similar case; though many other African languages with nowhere near as many speakers seem to be maintaining themselves fairly securely in a sort of symbiotic relationship with regional lingua francas. For now, anyway …
This is a feature widely found in the Himalayas. Foreign trekkers in Nepal are asked constantly by locals passing them on the trail “Where are you going?”. Foreigners take it as a literal question and answer with their trekking destination, but there is a set response that one is supposed to give instead.
That must be annoying for the locals. As the saying goes, a bore is someone who, when you ask how he is, tells you.
Are the set responses all of a similar kind, or do they vary a lot by language?
I’m pretty sure I’ve seen N’Ko used as the name of the literary language used for writing in the script, which is a koiné of sorts for the various Manding varieties that the script is intended to bridge. But I would also be curious as to what is meant by someone speaking in N’Ko. Does it simply mean any of these mostly mutually intelligible Manding varieties, or is it a koiné, perhaps even specifically a spoken version of the literary language?
This is a feature widely found in the Himalayas
Also in Indonesia. Standard greeting in the countryside is „mau ke mana“ and the standard response is „jalan jalan“ (out walking). Never heard of foreigners offering literal responses though, presumably anyone who speaks enough Indonesian to actually offer a literal response knows it’s a formulaic greeting.
This was a good article, especially (as noted) the online version, where you can hear several language samples. I have the Endangered Language Fund’s poster map of New York City’s languages on my home office wall — and it has a detailed insert map just for the neighborhood of Jackson Heights, in the borough of Queens.
Not to get political…but the article is especially timely, as on the same day a certain idiot — sorry, a certain poorly informed and malicious individual — from that same borough of Queens blathered to an anti-immigrant audience:
“We have languages coming into our country… They have languages that nobody in this country has ever heard of. It’s a very horrible thing.”
Not an idiot, alas: spewing xenophobic bile is an entirely rational strategy for the evil man.
The idea that only extreme circumstances will lead parents to stop attempting intergenerational transmission may be valid, but when you’re talking about a community of 150 Seke-speakers in Queens, the kids are going to thoroughly learn the locally dominant language(s) whether or not their parents teach them the heritage language. And unless the majority of their daily interactions are with the 149 other Seke-speakers rather than the millions of non-Seke-speakers they are now living among, it is unlikely that Seke will be their primary language in adulthood outside of limited domains like “talking to aunt so-and-so.” And for the next generation, how endogamous do we think a tiny community like this is going to end up being in the context of Queens.
The best way to preserve an ancestral language in diaspora may be to become farmers in some undersettled rural part of the new country where you can be locally dominant or at least locally significant and the government won’t be bothered to work too hard at assimilating your kids. This has to some extent worked for the Amish in the U.S., and for Mennonite groups in locations varying from Canada to Paraguay. Queens hasn’t been a propitious location for that strategy for a few centuries now.
a certain poorly informed and malicious individual … blathered to an anti-immigrant audience …
For demagogues, more important than knowing facts is to know what a large section of the audience wants to hear. The individual in question is undoubtedly well-informed about that, otherwise he would not know what to say. As DE put it, there is no ghost in that machine.
I suspect information is not of much interest to anti-immigrant audiences. They appear to motivated by fear of the unknown and the unintelligible. In the short run, reason must defer to irrationality. Nothing is achieved by saying: “Get a grip, Miss Thing” or launching into a fact-filled speech.
“We have languages coming into our country… They have languages that nobody in this country has ever heard of. It’s a very horrible thing.”
Reason might admonish: “what difference does it make whether you have ever heard of these languages? It’s no skin off your nose, you can’t understand them anyway.”
I suspect they fear that they might be accosted in a public restroom by a Tagalog-speaking transvestite, and not know how to say “no” in Tagalog. Those situations gênantes that often occur in dealings with foreigners.
Here in Cologne, where Turks abound (one cut my hair just this noon), I often pass by knots of young Turks shooting the bull, or small cafes where old Turks play cards and shoot the bull – and I wonder: “What could they be talking about?” The only answer I ever get is: “what do you care ? Probably the same kind of everyday guff that Germans exchange who don’t have their superior nose stuck in a book, unlike you”.
I have perhaps previously told the story of how in my first job out of law school working for a federal judge (more than 30 years ago now) we had to deal with an appeal from a rather icky-facts child-pornography conviction, where one of the minor issues was that some of the photos (which had been taken in the Philippines) were annotated with descriptions in Tagalog sexual slang. Which the prosecution wanted to explain to the jury. So the local federal prosecutors in western Pennsylvania called up someone at DOJ headquarters in Washington and said “we need an expert witness who can explain Tagalog sexual slang.” And lo and behold, DOJ found one for them. (A veteran of the U.S. Navy with a Filipina wife, if memory serves.)
Thank you all for your more nuanced observations on the “…horrible thing” quote.
J.W. Brewer wrote: “The best way to preserve an ancestral language in diaspora may be to become farmers in some undersettled rural part of the new country where you can be locally dominant or at least locally significant and the government won’t be bothered to work too hard at assimilating your kids.”
Excellent idea!
A kind of Brook Farm for language rehab.
Not mutually exclusive.
He actually tests ideas at his rallies by simply listening for the audience reaction. That still requires him to know in advance how not to get booed off the stage, but not more.
This is a feature widely found in the Himalayas
Also in Indonesia. Standard greeting in the countryside is „mau ke mana“ and the standard response is „jalan jalan“ (out walking). Never heard of foreigners offering literal responses though, presumably anyone who speaks enough Indonesian to actually offer a literal response knows it’s a formulaic greeting.
Here in Thailand and Laos too. Thai ไปไหน /pay ˈnǎy/, Lao ໄປໃສ /pay săy/. Often locals say to you in English “Where you go?”. I still don’t know how to answer so usually say “to the hotel” or “to drink coffee”.
I recently spent nine months in Malaysia picking up Malay. There I don’t remember hearing the equivalent though maybe people were saying “ka mana” and I’ve just kind of forgotten. I do remember telling people “jalan jalan” but I think I made it up because reduplication is fun, I don’t think I learned it specifically.
I have a feeling “where you go” is a Khmer thing too but it’s five or six years since I was there so I’m not positive.
that makes some interesting sense to me, with the ways that (if i’m remembering james scott right, and if he’s right in his observations) the cultural/political histories of southeast asia share a strong connection between geographic orientation and social/cultural/political positioning: upriver/downriver; coast/inland; towards/away from the mountains; etc.
>o>Miss Thing
I first encountered this expression addressed to a young girl of about ten by her mother. This may have given me a distorted idea of the full range of its use.
often pass by knots of young Turks shooting the bull, or small cafes where old Turks play cards and shoot the bull – and I wonder: “What could they be talking about?”
If history is any guide, the former are conspiring against the latter, and the latter are speculating what the former are talking about, since they are speaking in a variant of the language which the latter cannot understand.
I just read the article, with the interactive features.
Marking Lenape and Taíno on the map of endangered languages is weird. They are being revived after not being spoken for centuries. I suppose that they are endangered in the sense that the revived language has few speakers and an uncertain future, but the trajectory is different from most languages discussed here.
A 44-y.o. woman is presented with “According to E.L.A., she is the only known speaker of Kota, or Ikota, a language spoken in Gabon and the Republic of Congo, in the city.” Until I got to the end of the sentence, this didn’t make sense (there are tens of thousands of speakers in Africa.) Editors, up ’n’ at ’em!
The teacher of N’Ko, Ibrahima Traoré, taught Maninka at UPenn. There’s a 2011 article about him and about N’Ko and digital technology here (“…he reads N’Ko, a language few speakers of those languages would recognize…”; fingernails on chalkboard.)