Linguist Ross Perlin’s Quest to Preserve New York’s Endangered Mother Tongues

As part of Documented’s new “Our City” interview series, we are speaking to prominent and influential New Yorkers who have deep connections to New York’s immigrant communities, some of whom are immigrants themselves. We ask them about how they made New York City their own, where they feel most connected to in the city, current projects, and more.

THE DAY BEFORE Ross Perlin and I met, he visited a local library in Brooklyn. At the entrance a friendly security guard was having a conversation in Egyptian Arabic with someone standing next to him, while also helping them translate a phone call in English.

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Perlin, a linguist and author of the book “Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues,” tells me “That’s what keeps the city going.” “You have to think about that happening thousands of times a day around the city,” he says. “I thought it was a beautiful moment. Very simple. But actually quite profound.”

In New York City, where over 700 languages are spoken every day, people casually helping others translate a language into another happens in many more scenarios: at the hospital with patients and doctors; in neighborhoods with eyewitnesses and police officers; on the streets with passers-by and commuters; in school with children of immigrants and their parents; at home with children of deaf adults and their parents. 

Despite its language diversity, New York City lacks a linguistic infrastructure. Resources and information to navigate life in the city — directions, citywide announcements, etc. — are only translated into a few commonly spoken languages, leaving hundreds of thousands of people deprived of access to critical information. Perlin has made it one of his life’s goals to solve this problem. At the Endangered Language Alliance (ELA), a nonprofit research institute where he works, they provide community-based translation and interpretation services to government agencies at both the local and national level in a wide range of Indigenous and minority languages.

A New York native, Perlin says “Growing up as a kid in New York…you do have this sense of multilingual possibilities, and you are curious. And certain kinds of minds are trying to kind of grapple with all these languages. I was definitely influenced by it.”

Perlin grew up in Manhattan, and at 15 years old, moved away from the city for over a decade. First, to attend college at Stanford University in California, then Cambridge University in England. He then moved to Beijing for six months of full-time language study under a pledge, as he writes in his book, to speak English only on phone calls home. After studying Chinese, and later, linguistic research on Himalayan languages, he moved back to New York City in 2011 and ended up, now, in Ridgewood, Queens. 

The ELA, which focuses on documenting and supporting endangered languages in New York City and beyond, was in its early years when Perlin returned to the city. “At first I was just trying to listen and learn and throw myself into the research, and I had the initial thought, Oh, it’d be great to write something about this one day,” he tells me during our chat at ELA’s office. “But then what really did have an impact on me, the situation in March and April 2020, with the high point of COVID, hitting New York and seeing that the multilingual immigrant communities were the hardest hit, the essential workers, overcrowded housing, information only coming out in English or Spanish, a few languages. It was a linguistic crisis, as well as a public health crisis.”

Perlin, now 41 years old, later became co-director of the ELA, where he also edited the Languages of New York City map — a more accurate collection of information about the languages spoken in New York which finds at least three times as many as the U.S. Census Bureau says there are.

The ELA assists speakers of minority languages in the city in different ways. They became a crucial intermediary for survival in the recent years of COVID-19 pandemic, providing speakers of minority languages with timely information and resources in their languages, and documenting the pandemic’s disproportionate effects on these often-overlooked groups. 

At ELA’s donated office in the heart of Manhattan, Perlin, his co-director Daniel Kaufman, and a small team are also constantly handling messages from people seeking to preserve their languages, record their relatives, obtain information, or simply find someone to talk to. They also receive a variety of requests from courts, translation companies, artists, filmmakers, and others.

As for Perlin’s latest venture, his new book, he profiles six speakers of endangered languages from Asia (Seke, Wakhi), Europe (Yiddish), Africa (N’ko), and the Americas (Lenape, Nahuatl), who now reside in New York, and are striving to find a place for their mother tongues. Among them, the six speakers actually speak over 30 languages, but their mother tongue is the focus of the book. Around half of all New Yorkers speak a language other than English at home, Perlin writes, and many of the rest have non-English-speaking parents or grandparents. “Language City” focuses on how New York, the most linguistically diverse city in the history of the world, he says, has served as a home for so many languages and why it’s important to document the lesser known languages, which have systematically been undercounted. “I would say many linguists see as many as half of the world’s 7000+ languages as endangered and I would say about the same for NYC’s 700+.”

I think “Language City” is a book that you’re supposed to read more than once.

If you can bear it, yeah. Thank you for persevering.

[Laughs] I’m going to start from the very beginning. You dedicated the book to Cecil. May I ask who that is?

She is now my wife.

Congratulations! That’s so exciting! Did you meet before or while you were writing it?

We just got married three months ago, in the classic New York fashion, just going to City Hall with her sister as a witness. While I was writing the book we were dating, or at least, part of the time, because I was working on the book for about 10 years. She definitely put up with a lot while I was finishing the writing of it the last couple of years. One of the first things I asked her was to forgive me for being totally out of it half the time because my head was so much in it. She was also one of the first readers too, so I had to ask for a lot of forgiveness for that. 

In the intro of the book, you managed to escape answering a question you posed yourself about how many languages you speak. How fluent will you say you are in speaking the languages of the six speakers you profile?

[Laughs] Of the six languages, certainly, Yiddish is the one that I’m most fluent in partly because this is a family connection, there’s a long relationship and connection to the community of speakers.

I have tried to learn the other ones to different degrees. I would say that my Seke has [its good] moments and down moments. When we’ve been in Nepal with Seke speakers, it comes alive a little bit more. But when it’s not alive, it’s not in good shape. Similar experience with Wakhi in some ways. 

In the case of N’ko this is a writing system that stands in for a whole group of languages. I have a basic grasp of the writing system but I don’t have a spoken grasp of the Manding languages that it can be used to represent, which are super various. 

In the case of Nahuatl there is some elementary stuff that I can really understand but more comprehension than production, as linguists say. So it varies a lot. I’m just kind of in awe of the speakers that I profile.

“With the high point of COVID hitting New York…it was a linguistic crisis as well as a public health crisis.”

At what point would you say you realized you needed to write this book?

It took some years before I really could see that this should be a book and that this way of seeing the city had not been written about before. What really had an impact on me was the situation in March and April 2020 with the high point of COVID hitting New York and seeing that the multilingual immigrant communities were the hardest hit, the essential workers, overcrowded housing, information only coming out in English, Spanish, or a few languages. It was a linguistic crisis as well as a public health crisis.

And, we changed what we did here [at the Endangered Language Alliance] also. Some of the more academic, documentary, artistic work that we do here was suspended and we focused on public health language connections. And that time, I also decided that I needed to prioritize finishing this book, which had been kind of happening a bit too slowly. I realized that New York was not always necessarily going to be like this, we couldn’t just count on this to be the language capital forever, people to keep bringing their languages, that that might change.

The threats to the lives of immigrants, the languages of immigrants, which already, 2016 with Trump’s election, all of these anti-immigrant movements were already making clear that this extraordinary experiment of multilingual New York was not inevitable, could be threatened and could disappear. Writing the book was a way of saying we need to at least understand what’s here, have it in writing so that we can grapple with it, celebrate it, develop it.

“I would say many linguists see as many as half of the world’s 7000+ languages as endangered and I would say about the same for NYC’s 700+”

I checked out what other media outlets have said about the book, and I’m curious, which of all the six languages would you say has gotten less attention since you started press rounds, and which would you like to shed more light on?

That’s interesting. I think they’ve all gotten some attention. I guess we could say a little bit more about two of them. The six languages of course are six out of over 700, and it was not easy to choose which ones to focus on. 

To mention just two of those situations, in the case of Wakhi language, which I talked about in the book, our work has so much to do with who Husniya, the speaker, is. She was originally from Tajikistan and came here in the early 2010s. 

Husniya has learned a different kind of language at every level of her life. Just to set it up for New Yorkers. The Wakhi community, which is Central Asian, is also Persian, but also Soviet, but also Muslim, but actually, specifically Ismaili. All of these different kinds of layers that make up this kind of silk road culture. This is among the newest most growing communities and linguistically fascinating and complex and so multilingual.

N’ko, the writing system that Ibrahima, who I profile, has been teaching and spreading along with others, is also such a complex situation that a lot of people are amazed by it but also don’t know what to say or think. I hope the book gets people thinking about writing and the complexities around writing and technology. 

The book is, in some ways, focused on oral language because most languages have been primarily oral, traditionally oral, writing is only a small part of the story of human language.  

At Documented, we use WhatsApp to share information with Spanish speakers in New York. This was because we realized from research that it was a major messaging and social media app outside of the English speaking world. 

In the chapter about Seke language speakers in your book, you highlighted that WhatsApp and WeChat are platforms where word about housing openings and other information spread quickly because those platforms link Seke Speakers in New York and elsewhere. Are there ways that the city administration, news organizations and nonprofits can capitalize on using these platforms to share information or to provide services to minoritized communities?

What Documented is doing with WhatsApp is important and smart. It’s clear there are certain forms like WhatsApp, Viber, and WeChat for the Chinese and Himalayan worlds that are seriously important, and that the city needs to somehow consider in its communication strategies. 

What exactly that looks like can be hard to say sometimes because to some extent, the city understands it needs to work through community groups, and that they might be the ones that are directly putting things on WhatsApp or WeChat. I don’t see why not, given they’re already on Facebook and Twitter and other things. But how does the city do so in a sensitive way? Some of these group spaces are private. That’s a trusted space or community. It all has to do with the trusted messengers and community connections. It’s also tricky because these are platforms that are owned by big companies that I’m not even sure if they understand how they’re being used. 

Fair enough. Similar to how Haitian Creole became an official citywide language in 2008, what language do you think is soon to become finally recognized as an official citywide language?

Oh uh. [Laughs]. This is a tricky question because there are communities that are understandably lobbying and trying to get their languages listed as citywide languages. I can’t comment on specific languages, but there are a number which are deserving of it. The city is supposed to use the data that exists to determine that. 

Although I have a lot of criticism for census data about language — and we created our language map, partly because the Census does a bad job with language — I do think that it’s adequate for the largest languages. So, I’m confident the city will look at the data and that the data will be useful for determining that. 

Very diplomatic response.

[Laughs] Yes, yes. Well, you know, in a city world of over 700 languages, there’s only so much we can do. But what I will say is that while citywide languages are important — obviously, these are major languages that usually have something like 100,000 or more speakers here in the city — I still think there should be a special attention for languages in particular situations that may not have the biggest numbers. 

Maybe they don’t become citywide languages, but there’s a need for particular support for those languages in particular contexts. For instance, with the Department of Health, we’ve had this focus between us and the department on indigenous Latin American languages, which might not reach those kinds of numbers to be citywide languages. But we’re talking about people who have been in the most vulnerable situations. 

I’ve heard of city agencies in different situations in which they understand that certain languages are important for their situations. If it’s the Taxi and Limousine Commission, it’s important that they should be doing messages and having communication in Punjabi, for instance, or in certain African languages one of the drivers might be speaking.

What I found interesting when you were talking about N’ko earlier was that it’s a language system that can be used for different languages. That’s interesting. From my understanding of that, that means it depends on how you combine the writing system for each language, if that makes any sense. One example that comes to mind now is how, in some way, for the Yorùbá language, which is a Nigerian language, you can use the English alphabet for it, though it’s written differently. Is that how it is for the N’ko writing system too?

It’s a little different, but I think it’s useful to think about it that way. Sometimes we think of the way we write English as the English writing system, but it’s not. It’s a Latin based writing system. Those Latin letters which were used for Latin have been adapted for so many different languages, and linguists in a lot of cases help with that process of adapting Latin letters because that’s become the most common alphabet system to all kinds of languages and then you figure out as with Yorùbá, okay, well we need to mark tone, how are we going to do that, use these accents? English it’s the same way. It’s Latin based, but then you have to make these changes. So it’s not the English alphabet exactly. 

But it’s useful to think about writing systems as kind of separate from languages. Writing systems are tools which can be used for any number of languages. We then associate them iconically with the spoken language. I say the spoken language, but actually, they can float free of that and can be adapted to all kinds of different situations.

The complexity with N’ko is that it certainly could be used for all kinds of languages, but it’s been designed — and this is what makes it powerful — very specifically for a certain language family that has certain characteristics in its sound system. It has tones, it has certain combinations of sounds. So I don’t think the intention is for people to write it differently based on how they speak. But the intention is to provide a kind of single writing system that they can converge on that will make sense because of what they speak. So it also poses a really thorny question about what it takes to preserve and develop a language these days, and whether you have to have some kind of uniformity or unity in order to preserve it. 

And so, [with N’ko]what you’re seeing is people who speak Malinke versus Maninka versus Mandinka, obviously the name shares the same root. But it also could be a language like Jula, a language of Ivory Coast. These are all closely related languages that clearly come from the same source, and have been divided partly by colonial borders, partly by time, being knit back together through this writing system. It is very intellectually, politically, and culturally fascinating to see what that means, especially what it means to do that thousands of miles from the home area.

It was interesting to see how much progress N’ko has made. As you write:

“Those who know at least a little N’ko may now number in the hundreds of thousands. A much smaller number are intensely dedicated N’koists like the men of N’ko USA Inc., who continue Kanté’s enlightenment project with translations and original works on history, science, medicine, mathematics, and so on…as well as numerous periodicals and a growing presence online. They are opening N’ko schools, academies, bookshops, and associations wherever their migrations take them.” 

Why, despite this progress, is N’ko still an endangered language? Are there lessons from your case study on N’ko that can be applied to the preservation of the other five languages documented in your book? 

A language could be endangered in certain ways in certain places, but not in others.

In some ways, the situation of N’ko, revitalization could be where at some point it ceases to become endangered. People like Ibrahima, who I’ve talked to, and other members of the committee, do see it as endangered from where they’re sitting, certainly here in the U.S. But overall, it’s also quite a success story. 

In some ways Yiddish is becoming unendangered in New York today. It’s certainly a possibility, in some of these cases, that what happens is that the next generation picks it up. 

I think it remains to be seen what will happen with N’ko. The system was invented in the 1940s. Its inventor, Solomana Kanté, only passed away really a few decades ago. There’s still momentum and there’s still a lot happening. In terms of some lessons for the other languages from N’ko, definitely, the attention to technology and thinking about the digital realm is a really striking part of it. And is a big part of what I admire about Ibrahima. 

People often ask about the digital realm. Is it good for languages? Is it bad for languages? Now with AI, or augmented reality, virtual reality? There are all these possibilities that people are discussing around language. It’s complicated. First of all, people don’t, I think, even realize how few are the languages that have made it into the digital realm. Something like 5% of the world’s languages, as I talk about. Most of the rest have almost no digital presence. N’ko is starting to have a digital presence, which is amazing to make that leap.

“Someday English, too, will be down to its last speaker,” you write in your book. Do you really believe that? Can it actually happen?

It may take a long time, but history suggests that no matter how widely spoken the language, one day, it too will become endangered. It could be that English as we know won’t be spoken, but it’ll be languages that are somehow descended from English. In the long haul, just as nations rise and fall, languages rise and fall.

What do you think could potentially be the language that would replace English as the dominant one?

It might be a language that we don’t even have a name for at the moment. There are all kinds of interesting linguistic changes happening worldwide. It could be some new combination or mixture of languages.

Even though English is a dominant language in the city now, immigration continues to bring thousands of diverse language speakers. What similarities do you see between how language was stigmatized then versus now, and do you think hoping for change can actually lead to anything genuine? 

A true constant of the 400-year history of this city is that immigration has been at the center and linguistic diversity right along with it. Language is the key lens for understanding where people are coming from and what they’re bringing to the city — their specific identities more so in some ways than nations. 

I think there’s a cyclical nature to immigration, and anti-immigrant backlashes as well. The core of the book has to do with the world that the 1965 Immigration Act made. It kind of reopened the city in certain ways, as it had been in much of the 19th and early 20th century Ellis Island era. It reopened it, but in a more global way. 

But now, with anti immigrant politics kind of resembling past waves of anti immigrant politics, it takes different forms, but in some ways, there is a real continuity. Is there hope? That’s complicated. I think the accommodations of the past, and the accommodations of the present have both been very patchy. There are various attempts — they can be quite wonderful for a moment — but they’re usually not sustained. 

One of the big challenges and hopes that I would have is that somehow we can build what I call a linguistic infrastructure for the city in a more sustained way. But that may be hoping for too much.

The paragraph that really led me to ask the previous question was in the book, when you mentioned that “the linguistic accommodations on Ellis Island left a deep impression on new [immigrant] arrivals.” You quoted an immigrant from that time who later wrote that they “felt right at home” because immigration lines were formed in accordance with the languages immigrants spoke. The immigrant’s line spoke Yiddish. And immigration officials questioned each immigrant in their own language. This reads more welcoming in contrast to what immigrants experience in the hands of city wide services from officials today.

The passage I cite in the book from Ellis Island, which is just one that stood out, was that there was a Yiddish interpreter there [during intake], and that this immigrant had never seen any kind of official acknowledgement of Yiddish, which had no status in the places where it was originally spoken.

Today I see city officials who are trying in the current response to translate documents into Wolof and Fulani and trying to make sure there are people who understand Venezuelan Spanish or they’re enough Russian speakers or French speakers at certain sites. For moments, they do it. There is something. We’ve been involved at the Endangered Language Alliance in some work with city agencies, where, as I discussed a little bit in the book, we’re making messages in half a dozen indigenous Latin American languages that very rarely, if ever, have been supported in any way by any government.

I know that some of the speakers involved in that have just been deeply happy that there are some kind of messages being made in Mixtec, K’iche, and Kichwa, that are coming from the city. But usually, it’s kind of a one off thing. There’s one person in one agency for one period of time who is able to do that.

In the book, I liked that you called the New York City subway system, “fundamentally the City’s most democratic public space.” You put it in an interesting way: “the subway might not run throughout the world, but it can contain and display it, at all hours, for anyone who cares to see.” 

Often, I’ve asked interviewees of this column to tell me where in the city they feel connected to the most. Three people have said the subway, for that very reason. 

Good. It’s funny. Actually, the subway is not something that people usually glamorize. It’s meant to be functional. Often, it’s dysfunctional. But at the same time, it is a great work of human art, just the people in it. By and large, it is the circulatory system of the city and a place where all kinds of juxtapositions and meetings happen, which could happen nowhere else.

Exactly. And in this vein, where in the city would you say you feel connected to the most?

Hmm

You can’t say….

… I can’t say the subway now, yeah. I was just, the other night, in Flushing Meadows, Corona Park and the park was just one big party full of barbecue smoke, soccer, music, food and dancing. It was a beautiful summer night. I heard like a dozen different languages going on around me. All kinds of different activities were happening. I love summer in the city, especially because it brings everybody out. Of course, it’s tense and crazy and whatever.

Flushing Meadows, Corona Park, it was, you know, built for the World’s Fair. It still feels every day like the World’s Fair in a way, but like a real one, uh I mean, not that the original one wasn’t real, but that it was like a short, temporary project, and this is like, you know, a more permanent one.

I found it interesting that Husniya, the Wakhi speaker in the book, said:

“I could never ever think of coming to the States and working on my own language. For the Wakhis, it’s shocking: they’re trying to forget it, because they don’t need it. But now someone in the US is learning that? It’s like they must have nothing else to do!”

How do you convince a person otherwise? That preservation is essential. I acknowledge that writing this book is one way.

It’s true that a lot of people have internalized the idea that their language is not important because it’s not widely spoken or it’s not economically useful. 

A lot of the whole mission of the Endangered Language Alliance, and part of this book is making that case and then embodying it by saying yes, here in the middle of New York City — which you might think of as just a place of English and a place of money and that whole dream — there are a lot of people who are interested in this. Your language is important. It matters. It’s fascinating. It contains all kinds of knowledge. It contains poetry. We have public events where we want these languages to be onstage, we want people to hear them, we want to publish them, we want to archive them. All of those things are telling people that their language is important and that every language has things inside that are fascinating.

I think it does slowly kind of change people’s thinking. I don’t think, at the end of the day, that it’s a completely impossible battle. 

In light of all the work that you’re doing now, is the future of these languages still at stake?

As I say in the book, the future of all languages is bound up in cities. Languages won’t be able to survive only in a homeland, rural or mountain or distant area. They will also have to find ways to survive in cities if they’re going to survive at all. There is hope in that sense and there is a lot that has been accomplished by language activists and linguists working together with speakers.

At the same time, I think what we’re doing and what I described in the book is kind of just a small drop in the bucket of this larger planetary situation, which is probably not gonna be solved easily. We are living through a period of massive loss. We’re doing what we can to change that. 

This interview has been edited for concision and clarity.

Do you know who should be in the next Our City? Email earlyarrival@documentedny.com.

Fisayo Okare

Fisayo writes Documented’s "Early Arrival" newsletter and "Our City" column. She is an MSc. graduate of Columbia Journalism School, New York, and earned her BSc. degree in Mass Comm. from Pan-Atlantic University, Lagos.

@fisvyo