In the early 1990s, when I was putting in long hours in my first publishing job, bright-eyed and underpaid, my fellow editorial assistants and I would splurge on a communal dinner in “Little India,” as we cluelessly called it, a block on Manhattan’s East Sixth Street, between Second and Third Avenues. We’d usually opt for specials at Panna or Gandhi, savoring tikka dishes and saag ponir, naan fresh from the oven. Afterwards we’d saunter up and down St. Mark’s Place, checking out drag queens and leather punks and stoop sales. Was anyone ever so young?
In actuality these restaurants were (and still are) run by Bangladeshi proprietors who converse in Sylheti, a language within the broader Bengali-Assamese family, distant cousins to Hindi and Urdu. This is just one delicious tidbit from Ross Perlin’s Language City, his panoramic, enthralling survey of languages spoken in New York, clustered in neighborhoods and apartment buildings amid the outer boroughs. As he announces in his opening, “This book is about the most linguistically diverse city in the history of the world: its past, present, and future. Now home to over seven hundred languages, New York City is a last improbable refuge … At the very moment when languages worldwide are disappearing at an unprecedented rate, many of the last speakers are on the move. Far from being confined to remote islands, towering mountains, or impenetrable jungles, they are now right next door.”
The majority of these languages have dwindled to a handful of speakers. Perlin showcases, in granular detail, the Herculean efforts of the Endangered Language Alliance (ELA), housed at a nondescript address on Eighteenth Street, where he serves as Co-Director. Language City manifests his passion for the tools of his trade — grammar, vocabulary, lingua francas, loan words, even clicks in sub-Saharan Africa — while avoiding the pitfalls of academic texts. At ELA, Perlin and a colleague, Daniel Kaufman, spearhead a team of committed linguists and volunteers to archive as much information as possible before these tongues are silenced. In some instances, they rely solely on oral communication; no scripts or written forms exist. In other cases ELA revives the languages with the aid of social media: the clock may be ticking but Tik-Tok plays a rejuvenating role, along with Instagram, linking speakers across oceans and continents.
From its beginnings as a Dutch colonial outpost, New York was a pluralistic mecca, unlike New England which maintained firm strictures on who belonged (British colonists) and who did not. Centuries before Emma Lazarus’s poem, the masses were already huddling at the tip of Manhattan, cursing and shouting at each other in a plethora of tongues. Perlin skirts the technical aspects of linguistic study — no deep dives into fricatives or Noam Chomsky controversies — immersing us instead in the peoples, places, and politics that shape ELA’s mission (though there’s abundant explication of how languages evolve). He devotes the second section to an overview of the languages and communities targeted by ELA through research, interviews, recordings, gumshoe reporting, even WhatsApp chats.
Perlin builds his arc from lavish asides and anecdotes. Certain subway lines, for example, stand in for specific tongues, “Russian on the B/Q, Haitian Creole on the 2/3.” Little Syria sprouted on Washington Street in lower Manhattan; denizens spoke Levantine Arabic. Today Egyptian Christians conduct their affairs in Arabic but pray in Coptic, “last descendant of the pharaohs’ language.” Mosques scattered throughout the boroughs flourish as multilingual spaces. Part of the Great Migration, Gullah speakers fled the coastal South and racial oppression, adding flavor to the gumbo of Black English in New York.
Perlin’s discussion of indigenous languages is stellar; that ELA has discovered so many native American tongues among the city’s nooks and crannies is both an investigative coup and a marvel of empathy. In the 1920s, Mohawk families moved from upstate reservations to establish “Little Caughnawaga” in downtown Brooklyn. Nahuatl and Mixtec, from Mexico’s southern states, have migrated as well. The region’s original language, Lenape, seeks tenuous roots within the metropolis. He notes of Kichwa speakers from Ecuador: “Many who migrate want not just a family, but something they call iony — an expression (“I-OH-knee”) which derives from the logo I♥NY and connotes not only New York (which is also known as Yoni), but the whole glamorous package of North American lifestyles and attitudes. Indeed, for all the factors that ‘push’ minority, survivor, and indigenous peoples to New York, a whole range of ‘pull’ factors have always been operative, resulting in a city that now looks more and more like the world itself.”
Nestled at the heart of Language City are profiles of six New Yorkers, speakers of endangered languages. Rasmina belongs to a Seke-language community mostly housed in a couple of buildings in Flatbush; they comprise the largest expatriate group outside a clutch of Himalayan villages. A special education teacher, Husniya speaks Wakhi, native to the arid mountains of Tajikistan; English is, by Perlin’s count, her ninth language. Ibrahima advocates for the spread of N’ko, a West African alphabet less than eight decades old, its characters representing phonemes and tones from Manding languages. Karen treks from Canada to offer instruction in Lunaape, or Lenape, “the first, as far as anyone knows, to bring the language back to the city is this way.” An aspiring chef, Irwin, a Nuahtl speaker, traces his heritage to pre-Hispanic Mexico; ELA has given him the resources to document his mother tongue, “increasingly emboldened, despite centuries of discrimination, to speak, teach, and write.” Boris, Perlin’s acquaintance of 14 years, plots a Yiddish epic as he strolls beneath Brooklyn’s Belt Parkway.
These six figures imbue Perlin’s arguments about linguistics in the here and now, surviving and striving and indeed thriving across the five boroughs. He travels with them back to their hometowns, fleshing out encounters large and small, distilling a history of diaspora and pain that reads like equal parts travelogue and thriller. His pursuit of endangered languages is forensic, examining Creoles like fibers left at the scene of a crime: who did what to whom, and why? Perlin also weaves in his own story; his grandfather, who died in 1997, was the last Yiddish speaker in his own extended lineages. He probes the poignancy and complexity of his own feelings, lending a candor and tenderness to his account.
“Every summer, several hundred people, including many families with children, gather at a camp or bungalow colony upstate. Call it a ‘metalinguistic’ community,’ for almost all speak English and few are native or day-to-day speakers of Yiddish,” he writes. “But for a week they choose to try to speak the language, everywhere from the swimming pool to the dance floor, giving it a curious postvernacular afterlife. At other Yiddish-related festivals … the language was clearly surviving more as seasoning than substance … The post-sixties embrace of heritage, genealogy, identity, ethnicity, and multiculturalism — anything beyond the assimilationist paradigm — has put a puff of wind in the sails of sinking secular Yiddish. The Yiddishist gatherings were usually warm and joyous, but at some level seemed deeply unnatural. Reality, it was hard not to feel, was always still in English.”
Hence the linguist’s dilemma: the conquering languages, from English to Mandarin to Portuguese (thanks to Brazil), dominate and encroach. Perlin never waves away the scope of the tragedy, but we sense a kind of transcendence in the work he does, how it connects him to a profound human narrative: “Many linguists are extraordinary polyglots, like Roman Jakobson, who is said to have been dazed after an accident and starting calling for help in the twenty-five he knew. But most linguists study Language, not languages.” In our STEM-driven age, we owe Perlin and ELA our gratitude. It’s only the second week of January, but I’d be willing to bet a steak dinner at Peter Luger’s — or curry chicken at Panna II — that Language City will be one of 2024’s superlative nonfiction titles, a love letter to this inclusive, quixotic, exuberant metropolis.
[Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on February 20, 2024, 432 pages, $28.00 hardcover]
