Ross Perlin‘s Language City, winner of the British Academy Book Prize 2024, explores the global crisis of endangered languages by focusing on the extraordinary linguistic diversity of New York City. Weaving history and linguistics with human stories, Perlin’s compelling, hopeful narrative documents grassroots efforts to preserve minority languages against extinction amid migration, gentrification and cultural change, writes Chris Featherman.

Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues. Ross Perlin. Grove Press. 2024.

Along Roosevelt Avenue in Queens, one of New York’s five boroughs, more than 300 languages are spoken, from Mixtec and Mongolian to Aymara, an indigenous language of Bolivia, and the Maranao of immigrant Filipino healthcare workers. Such abundance along a single street denotes an intensely multilingual city, where residents speak over 800 languages, a concentration that sociolinguist Jan Blommaert called superdiversity, an outgrowth of globalisation-driven mobility and migration. Yet nearly eight of nine languages spoken in New York are currently at risk of extinction, a staggering rate that reflects the global imperilment of linguistic diversity: nearly half of the world’s some 7,000 documented languages are endangered, with more than 1,500 predicted to be lost by the end of the century.  

But as writer, translator, language activist, and lecturer in linguistics at Columbia University Ross Perlin explains in Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues, such loss won’t happen without resistance. Along with his colleagues at the Endangered Language Alliance (ELA), where he is Co-Director, Perlin supports and celebrates the city’s linguistic diversity by documenting its indigenous, minority, and endangered languages. It’s a self-described quixotic mission – ”a wonderful madness” (37) – that has already produced ten large-scale documentation projects and an interactive language map. It has also deeply informed Perlin’s book, a fascinating social history infused with linguistic acumen, journalistic portraiture, and a tour guide’s sense of place, all in tribute to New York’s multilingual past, present, and future. 

Just as biodiversity matters for maintaining our planet’s ecological equilibrium, linguistic diversity is vital for preserving threatened cultures and communities in unequal societies.

Suffused in Perlin’s account is a radical sensibility, one that simultaneously acknowledges the dynamic relationship between language and power and asserts that “all languages are cognitively and communicatively equal” (25). It’s a perspective that also drives his thesis: just as biodiversity matters for maintaining our planet’s ecological equilibrium, linguistic diversity is vital for preserving threatened cultures and communities in unequal societies. For “language,” Perlin argues, “represents thousands of natural experiments: ways of seeing, understanding, and living that should rightly form a major part of any meaningful account of what it means to be human” (26). Though linguists can no more recover a lost language than scientists can, for now, de-extinct the wooly mammoth, they should, Perlin urges, fight for those endangered. 

In rendering New York’s linguistic past, Perlin weaves familiar facts and anecdotes with unsung protagonists and lesser-known histories. We learn, for instance, not only of European colonists displacing indigenous peoples and their languages from Manhattan but of the reverse migration, centuries later, of Native Americans, fleeing impoverished lives on reservations for economic opportunities in the city, where they have preserved traditions through intertribal powwows in the Bronx and the work of activists at the American Indian Community House. We learn how colloquialisms from as far as Martinique and Liberia intermixed among Harlem residents to shape not just the jive of Jazz Age hepsters but also the city’s enduring lexicon of place and social strata. We find out that Ladino, a mixture of Old Spanish and Hebrew layered with Greek, Turkish, and French, endures in celebrations at a Queens synagogue basement despite nearly all Ladino speakers having been murdered in the Holocaust. 

Histories of displacement and immigration, survival and commemoration, frame the heart of Perlin’s study, New York’s extraordinary multilinguistic present.

These histories of displacement and immigration, survival and commemoration, frame the heart of Perlin’s study, New York’s extraordinary multilinguistic present. With Perlin we crisscross the five boroughs to meet six speakers of endangered languages from Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas, “all now living in New York and striving to find a place in the city and the world for their mother tongues” (5). Among them is Ramina, a speaker of Seke, a language from the Tibeto-Burman family, who like her relatives has exchanged the rammed-earth houses of northern Nepal’s high deserts for a six-storey apartment building in Brooklyn. We also discover that Ibrahima, originally from Guinea, not only teaches the endangered West African script N’Ko for free in mosques but is also building a one-thousand-plus-article N’ko Wikipedia. A few neighbourhoods away we find Irwin enticing speakers of Nahuatl, an indigenous language of Mexico threatened by Spanish and scarcely spoken in the US, with home-cooked tamales. 

Inspiring as these stories may be, what’s next for these endangered languages, as well as for those fighting to preserve them, is unclear. Will multilingual megalopolises like New York, forged by colonisation and globalisation, be enduring language strongholds or illusory redoubts in a decolonising, post-global world? Urban migration is predicted to continue rising in the coming decades, but “gentrification and the spiraling cost of housing,” Perlin explains, “are now putting large parts of cities like New York out of reach” to immigrants, causing him to speculate that for endangered languages, “the outskirts may be the future” (344). Globally, similar economic pressures are at play. “Like biodiversity, with which it is clearly linked,” Perlin writes, “linguistic diversity remains strongest today in remote and rugged regions traditionally beyond the reach of empires and nation-states.” Though language contact – when speakers of different languages interact – doesn’t necessarily drive language loss, increased road density can, paving the way both for commerce and link languages like English, Chinese, or Swahili in which it is administered. 

Perlin’s quest, like the sociolinguistic tapestry of New York he’s woven in this book, is thus both an act of hope and an urgent honouring of language and life. 

Do these facts, then, suggest that in emerging economies, efforts to preserve endangered languages may be at odds with developmental goals? And what of language, migration, and political cohesion? While linguistic diversity has been shown to positively affect labour productivity, the ethnic fractionalisation it can engender may undermine political instability and thus hurt economic growth. And for cities like Barcelona, which over recent decades has received a high number of foreign migrants, programs to help newcomers preserve their languages may unintentionally hinder efforts to maintain Catalan, which while not endangered, remains threatened despite robust language policy, advocacy, and revitalisation efforts.  

While such tensions and complexities extend beyond Perlin’s focus, economics and immigration hum in the background of his writing. For the stories he tells in Language City are never solely about language. As Perlin explains, for instance, the agglutinative morphology of the Native American language Lenape or the velvety consonants of Wakhi, a close cousin of Persian, we also learn about the lives of working-class immigrants in New York. Written into their struggles to document and preserve these endangered languages are stories of migration patterns and visa hassles, of rent sharing and organised reciprocity strategies, of the precarity of day laborers and minimum-wage workers as well as the critical footholds offered them by language centres and community colleges.  

Far from New York, in a global seed vault on the High Arctic Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, 1.3 million seeds collected from over 7,000 species around the globe are being stored as a preventative counterweight against climate change-induced crop failure. Endangered languages, once documented, can similarly be safeguarded – stored in a digital ark – as Perlin and his confreres are proving. But just as seeds need soil to grow, a language, to live, must be shared. Perlin’s quest, like the sociolinguistic tapestry of New York he’s woven in this book, is thus both an act of hope and an urgent honouring of language and life. 

Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Image: James Andrews1 on Shutterstock

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