Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues

"This book is very fluently written and very engaging. What he’s concerned about are minority or endangered languages. He says that there are around 7000 languages spoken across the world, but only 4% of the world’s population speaks 96% of those. So the languages spoken by most of the people in the world are very few in number. And yet there is this huge richness—of 6000+ languages—spoken by very small communities, often in very fragile, remote places, that are under threat. What he focuses on is New York City because, as he says, one out of 10 of every language on the planet is being spoken at some time in the city, which is phenomenal. It’s probably true of London as well, as of any of these large, cosmopolitan cities that have drawn people in from across the globe. He talks about the larger questions first, and then he follows six case studies of individuals. They’re very poignant because they tell you about displacement, about leaving the place where your language was your mother tongue, to come for employment or for all sorts of other reasons to New York City, and then the life you make there. One of the very striking things he does is visit what he calls ‘vertical villages’ in Brooklyn. There’s one city block where practically everyone in it speaks Seke, a threatened Tibeto-Burman language from the Himalayas. It’s spoken in only two villages, which are under threat because they’re on the border. They’re always overwhelmed by either the Burmese, Chinese or Tibetan speakers, and they live a very precarious existence. And yet, in this apartment block in Brooklyn, these two villages somehow have a thriving village of Seke speakers. He has lots of cases like that which are interesting and can be funny, because of the way he writes. The way his informants respond to him can be very funny too. But it’s also sad. What will be lost with the losing of these languages is untold richness. Just as with Annabel Sowemimo’s book about the health service, and Conway’s book too, there is a feeling that this is something we need to be alert to. He’s not trying to propose any great solution. Language strength is often determined by other things. It’s about politics. If there is war and peoples are shifted and scattered, or their whole way of life is under threat, languages are bound to disappear. Also, for a language to survive in New York, it has to adapt, to find terms for things that if you’re up in a Himalayan village you never have to think about. Do you borrow words? Do you invent words? With European languages, anglophones often mock the French for developing really complicated words for things because they don’t want to adopt an English term. There’s a sense in which that also applies here. He’s not trying to fix languages as museum pieces. These are living languages. All languages change all the time, but they have their vulnerabilities. The trouble is that for many of these languages, the change will mean disappearance as the native speakers disappear."

"This is a wonderful book that is completely unlike all other books about endangered languages. Ross Perlin works at the Endangered Language Alliance in New York city, which is working to reclaim, revitalise and preserve languages. They are not interested in mourning or lamenting. So many of these books are about tracking down the last speaker, and, when you finally find them, they can only say one word and no one knows what it means. But if you read Perlin’s book, it’s full of life. It’s radical. It’s exciting. Out of those 7000 on the planet, 700 of them can be found in New York, and many of those are endangered, because this is where refugees have ended up. He describes an apartment block-which he calls ‘a vertical village’-where 100 people speak Seke, a language from Nepal. There are only 700 speakers of Seke worldwide. These 100 speakers are in New York, they’ve been transplanted, but they are keeping it alive. He talks about Lenape, the language spoken in Manhattan before it was settled. He says that there would be a sort of magical justice if New Yorkers were all suddenly speaking Lenape. It’s a book that’s full of humour. At one point, the wonderful woman who is trying to keep Lenape alive gets a parking ticket and she jokes that maybe she should say: It’s my ancestral land, I’m not going to pay it. I love that. I love the whole approach to keeping it alive, speaking it, connecting through it, and just enjoying the richness of it. He describes walking down the street in the borough of Queens, and just how many languages he hears in a short walk. Someone needs to do this for London. It’s very positive in that way. This is a book about movement and migration, transplantation and displacement. It’s an exciting, optimistic book about endangered languages."