Half of all New Yorkers speak a language besides English at home, and many of the rest have non-English-speaking parents or grandparents. This linguistic diversity goes back a long way: as soon as the Dutch arrived, establishing more of a trading post than a colony, New York became a Babel of tongues. “On the island of Manhate [Manhattan], and in its environs,” reported the Jesuit Father Jogues in 1646, “there may well be four or five hundred men of different sects and nations: The Director General told me that there were men of eighteen different languages.” That number probably doesn’t include the varieties of Munsee spoken by New York’s native inhabitants; today Munsee lives on, but with just a few speakers left, the youngest in her seventies.
By the late 19th century, New York had become a melting pot of footloose Europeans—Brooklyn was a Scandinavian port, Manhattan was a great Irish metropolis, and the entire city of New York was the third-largest German-speaking city in the world. Today New York houses languages large and small, famous and unknown, from every corner of the globe. The way Mexico sounded before Cortes, now in El Barrio; the languages of West Africa, arrayed along 116th Street; the languages of Luzon and Java alive on the Asian streets of Queens. All the big ones are here—if a language has a million speakers worldwide, most likely one of those speakers lives in New York—but so are many endangered and vanishing languages.
At the Endangered Language Alliance, disappearing languages are documented by recording the words of a wide variety of speakers, including immigrants, refugees, students, businessmen, activists, and many others. Recordings have been made in thirty or so of the world’s smallest and most endangered languages: Shughni from southeastern Tajikistan, Kabardian from the northern Caucasus, Amuzgo from Mexico. Researchers work slowly with a community over months and years, delving deep into elements of language.
Some of the languages documented, like Purhepecha from Mexico, are “isolates,” the last remaining representatives of a whole language family. Others have sounds or structures found nowhere else in human speech. It might be the way clauses are chained together, the play of stress and accent, the liberation of word order, the almost endless complexity of verb endings. The “personality” of a language is the hardest thing to study. Whatever it sounds like, every language is a sophisticated, irreplaceable record of both a world and a worldview; all have features, as the linguist Carol Genetti writes, “that give a language its beauty, its unique personality, and its genius.”
The great migrations, increasingly diverse till the early 20th century, came to a sudden halt with the Immigration Act of 1924, with its hard cap on immigrants and its racist quotas in favor of Northern and Western Europe. The city’s diversity was becoming just a little less radical. By the time the United Nations arrived in New York City in the 1950s, it was mostly a town of seven particular tribes: Irish, Italian, Jewish, African American, Puerto Rican, West Indian, and Dominican. This is what many now think of as the dynamic “old New York”—but it was the most static the city has been, linguistically speaking, since its founding.
Then, in 1965, Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act, abolishing the quotas and making immigrants’ skills and family relations paramount. America’s annual intake of immigrants started climbing again, back toward seven figures. Asians and Africans and South and Central Americans started arriving in waves. Fleeing war and oppression, several thousand Cambodians came to New York’s Bronx area. Thousands of Albanians moved into Italian neighborhoods, many running the old pizza parlors. The secret language of barbers changed from Italian to Russian. The Vietnamese settled into the Chinatowns, Mexicans appeared in East Harlem, and Tibetans began selling Christmas trees on the sidewalks. No one could say why. The former Soviet Union, in all its multicultural variety, arrived on the shores of Brooklyn.
Immigration in New York is so fast and fluid, suffusing the city in so many different ways, that the specific effects are easily missed. So the guy spreading flour on your pizza doesn’t speak Italian—will you even notice if one day he stops speaking Albanian? The city is endlessly incorporating new cultures, and no one doubts that immigrants deeply shape the city. No other archetype—not the actor, artist, or banker—is as consistently linked to New York as the figure of the immigrant. But there’s still an unease: we may well be swallowing up the world’s diversity and spitting out monoculture.
New York now takes in more and more immigrants, speaking more languages than ever before and making up a more plausible microcosm of global linguistic diversity than any city in history. Yet the place, almost by design, seems ever less than the sum of its parts, an endpoint for cultures, “a Babel in reverse,” in the words of its most famous newspaper.
The Endangered Language Alliance is an attempt to “catch language” in New York, before languages blend together and disappear. It is a small nonprofit in an old commercial building above 18th Street, consisting of three desktop computers, some overworked recording equipment, a website, a digital archive, and a scattered group of linguists who make ends meet elsewhere.
Of the world’s more or less 7,000 languages, up to 800 may now be spoken in the New York metropolitan area, more than in any other city—only London and Paris come close. Of the estimated 176 languages indigenous to and still spoken in the United States, at least fifty are nearly extinct, with fewer than ten speakers. Nearly everywhere, centuries of imperialism, capitalism, urbanization, environmental destruction, and nation-building are now having their full linguistic effect. It’s another extinction event, parallel to the massive, ongoing loss of plant and animal species. At least half of the world’s languages are likely to disappear within the next century or two: those that are unwritten, least documented, and in some cases completely unknown outside their speech communities are in greatest danger.
There are powerful arguments for the value of linguistic diversity. Education research shows that children learn best in their mother tongue. Being raised multilingual—the norm outside the English-speaking world—can improve cognitive development, and possibly have an effect on one’s capacity for empathy. The active suppression, stamping out, and shaming into silence of languages should also be understood as a question of justice and human rights—it’s the powerful, over and over again, who impose their words on the powerless. Evidence seems to indicate that indigenous peoples with resilient languages and cultures are better able to withstand social breakdown. And consider the massive loss of knowledge and wisdom and art that comes with the loss of any language, which no amount of last-minute translation can stop. Each language’s vanishing, as the linguist Ken Hale writes, would feel “like dropping a bomb on the Louvre.”
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