That’s according to Ross Perlin, linguist and co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance based in New York City.
In his new book, “Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York,” Perlin writes about his experiences connecting six different speakers about their languages. Some are the very last people to still speak a native language distinct from their ethnic and cultural backgrounds.
He also talks about how linguists are working together to preserve languages that once thrived in communities around the globe. Perlin and his team have mapped out over 700 known languages across New York, where many have come from abroad, searching for new opportunities and livelihoods.
“New York today may be the most linguistically diverse city, not just in the world, but in the history of the world,” he said. “Cities have always been places where people have gathered from all over, of course, and many languages have been spoken.”
He joined The World’s Carolyn Beeler to discuss the efforts to save some of New York’s most endangered languages.
Carolyn Beeler: So, early on in your book, you introduce us to Rasmina, a 26-year-old Seke speaker living in Brooklyn. Can you tell me about Seke and why there are only several hundred people left in the world who speak it?
Ross Perlin: It is a classic case of an endangered language in many ways. You know, there are many, many languages which just have a few hundred speakers. There are many languages which have really just one or a few speakers. In the case of Seke, we’re talking about a language that essentially comes from five villages in Nepal close to the border with Tibet. It’s related to Tibetan, but pretty distantly. It’s not mutually intelligible with it. It’s its own language. And it’s in a highly multilingual area of the Himalayas. This is a place where the villages are over 10,000 feet [high], and there’s a lot of out-migration for various reasons. Just within the last few decades, a substantial portion has come to New York as part of this kind of extraordinary new Himalayan diaspora here, which we’ve been working to document. And, you know, of at most maybe 700 speakers, over 100 have actually kind of come through this one particular building, a kind of vertical village I describe in the book, which is in the middle of Brooklyn, where Rasmina has lived. And we’ve, at this point, been using a kind of Roman Latin-based alphabet modified for Seke to try to represent what the speaker’s intuitions would be so that they can actually see the subtitles on the videos that we’re posting where the elders and others are speaking.
You mentioned recording elders speaking Seke because it’s not a written language. How do you preserve a language that traditionally lacks a written component?
The majority of the world’s languages historically have been primarily oral. Writing is really, you know, much newer than spoken language, which has a much longer history. And for most people, most communities in daily life, you know, oral language was totally sufficient. Of course, today, writing has a major place in our societies. And, you know, it is one component, certainly of documenting a language as well as potentially if you want to teach and revitalize a language. Linguists have the International Phonetic Alphabet, which is kind of like a periodic table for sounds that we can use to really specify where exactly what’s happening and to transcribe. But then, you know, it’s usually important also to have what is called a “practical orthography,” you know, a writing system that people themselves might use and be able to sort of type in and do things in.
You write, in what I think is a lovely sentence: “Languages today are not dying natural deaths or evolving into new forms, the way Latin evolved into romance. Now more than ever, languages are being hounded out of existence.” What do you mean by that?
This is something vital to understand. I think for people, because I’m often asked, “Well, haven’t languages always come and gone, and, you know, aren’t new languages coming into being?” Well, the answer is that very few new languages are coming into being and that the sort of event that is happening today, this massive loss of, you know, as you said, almost as much as half of the world’s linguistic diversity — over 7,000 languages — is really something that at an unprecedented scale, that reflects very specific processes, historical processes that are ongoing, that are connected to colonialism and the spread of religions and the spread of markets and the kind of imposition of larger languages. It’s not just that larger languages have been, “This is useful, and, you know, we’ll all get along better and so on,” — which there isn’t really much evidence for — but, it’s that speakers of larger languages have been imposing their languages. The languages that are endangered are the ones that have been marginalized, where people have been told that their languages are not real or good or, you know, if they’re not written, they’re somehow broken or don’t have grammar. None of these things really make sense from a linguistic point of view because there’s as much, if not more complexity often in many of the languages that we’re talking about. And then you have the interruption of intergenerational transfer; this is really the key factor in language endangerment: It’s not just about the number of speakers; it’s about whether children are learning the language and whether caregivers and parents are feeling comfortable about passing it on. And that’s what’s being interrupted so much today because, you know, that hounding out of existence I’m talking about is pressure and the attitudes that are being sort of brought to bear on non-speakers of smaller languages.
Do you think that is changing at all though? I mean, you know, there have been these waves of anti-immigrant sentiment in the US going back centuries, and there was a value placed on assimilation and speaking English at home so that kids would have more opportunities than their immigrant parents. But now a lot of people really value giving their children two or more languages and raising their kids bilingual. Do you think that there is a different attitude that might help preserve some of these languages more going forward than in the past?
I hope we’re seeing the beginnings of a change. And I hope that “Language City” is a part of that. The evidence about the benefits of raising children bilingually, the cognitive benefits, the social benefits … that’s relatively recent. And so, even still, you’ll meet people today and certainly a few decades ago who would say, “Actually, oof, I don’t want to teach my kid three languages because actually that’s going to burden them. They won’t end up speaking English or the larger one well enough.” It’s actually been shown that that’s not the case. The multiple languages will benefit you in various ways.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Sign up for our daily newsletter