Welcome to New York City!
NYC is known as a melting pot for people coming to the United States from different countries, bringing with them their language and culture to share with their new country. In the borough of Queens, more different languages are spoken per square mile than anywhere else in the world.
Sadly, many of these are endangered languages that will disappear by the end of the century. There are about 7,000 spoken languages worldwide, and about half are thought to be at risk. What does this mean?
• Endangered: Languages with only adult speakers and no child learners
• Critically Endangered: Languages with only elderly speakers
• Sleeping/Dormant/Extinct: Languages with no first-language speaker
Linguists Daniel Kaufman and Ross Perlin started the Endangered Language Alliance (ELA) to study endangered languages in NYC. So far, they have found speakers of 700 different languages, of which 150 are endangered.
Fun Fact: 700 people worldwide speak Seke, a native language from Nepal, and a quarter of them live in or near two apartment buildings in Brooklyn!
Many of the languages in NYC are from Indigenous communities that struggle for representation. For example, the Latino health initiative contacted the ELA to help Indigenous Latin Americans communicate with city agencies, because these agencies saw them as Mexican or Guatemalan.
NYC has designated these languages as “citywide” and provides interpretation services: Arabic, Bengali, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), French, Haitian Creole, Korean, Polish, Russian, Spanish, and Urdu. The city’s website offers Google Translate to translate its content into other languages.
Good news: Google Translate just added 110 new languages for a total of 238.
Better news: Check out PanLex, which translates into 5,700 languages!
I now say goodbye like a New Yorker: Ayó! (Garifuna) Caki! (Hidatsa) Màj! (iKota)
Read More:
Carp, Alex. “The Endangered Languages of New York” The New York Times, Feb 22, 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/02/22/magazine/endangered-languages-nyc.html
Bromham, L., Dinnage, R., Skirgård, H. et al. Publisher Correction: Global predictors of language endangerment and the future of linguistic diversity. Nat Ecol Evol 6, 231 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-022-01684-4
https://www.nyc.gov/site/civicengagement/about/language-access-plan.page