Ross Perlin and his book, Language City. Photo by Cecil Howell/Canva
By PJ Pigs
March 1, 2024
Language CityRoss Perlin’s fascinating profile of New York’s endangered languages, begins with a mention of another city’s fabled landmark, where linguistic diversity came to represent “nothing but confusion, divine punishment for the urban hubris that dared build a tower to the heavens.”
That would be Babel, where human division is said to have emerged for lack of a lingua franca. But, Perlin writes, that’s not the full story — especially if you are, like him, a linguist concerned with the original words. The Bible says that prior to Nimrod’s blasphemous high-rise there were already 70 nations in the world, “each with its language” or אִ֖ישׁ לִלְשֹׁנ֑ו (ish lilshono). Perlin’s book makes a rousing case that language variety, and the efforts to preserve it, can unify a metropolis populated by survivors, innovators and cultural custodians.
It’s a “snapshot of Babel,” Perlin, the co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, says of his book, which does a deep dive on six languages: Seke (from Nepal), Wakhi (originating from Central and South Asia), Yiddish (Western and Eastern Europe), N’Ko (a written system for West African languages), Nahuatl (an indigenous language from Mexico) and Lenape (the original language of Manhattan, down to one native speaker who lives in Canada).
Each chapter follows a speaker, including the former editor of the Yiddish ForwardBoris Sandler, and explains the unique, but often common challenges, to maintaining an oral tradition threatened by majority languages, assimilation and a dominant culture hostile to their continuation.
Taking us from the Himalayas to the “vertical villages” of Flatbush and the bustling polyglot ELA office on 18th Street, Perlin’s book is a funny, deeply empathic and endlessly educational cross section of five boroughs at the intersection of the world.
I spoke with Perlin about what makes languages endangered, getting the Yiddish Forward in Kunming, China, and Donald Trump’s possible, accidental promotion of his book. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Can you define what makes a language endangered — it feels like a different metric than like, the last black rhinoceros.
A language is not a species. There are different metrics that are used that you may see from UNESCO or certain language databases, but I don’t think there’s any single one. The most important criterion is intergenerational transmission. There are cases where there may even be a few million speakers of a language, but if intergenerational transmission drops off then in one generation language can really be broken and we would know that in a few decades it’s unlikely to last.
Broadly, there’s agreement among linguists that as many as half of the world’s languages today are endangered, but certainly there’s a lot of room for nuance and discussion for any given case what endangerment looks like. There sometimes are movements that actually can reverse endangerment. Having worked in this area for a couple of decades, you can say that endangerment is a more and more pervasive condition, given the onslaught of larger languages.
You start the book with your own linguistic history — your family were Yiddish speakers and that dropped off as was so often the case. Was that a way into the field for you?
It wasn’t until I was actually doing my PhD fieldwork research in China on Trung, this language spoken really in one valley, that I really began to look back at the language in my own family and its story of endangerment and revival. I had a sort of lens back into something of my own background, and began to approach Yiddish not just as a set of warm words and punchlines and fuzzy feelings, but actually as a language, with a grammar, with a literature, with a theater — and Jewish languages more broadly, likewise. And then there was a sort of interesting convergence where Boris Sandler of the Ververt knew that I was actually subscribing to the Yiddish Forward in China, receiving it by remaining postif you know what that is.
No.
This is a sort of beautiful old feature of the postal system, globally, where you can receive mail to a post office if you don’t have a sort of fixed, reliable address. So I would receive the Yiddish Forward to the general post office in Kunming. And it was just such a delight to receive that there, and it often would not get torn open, because the censors who might otherwise in China be looking at potentially seditious mail or periodicals from abroad could not read Yiddish. So I would read this sitting in the tea houses of Yunnan.
I guess Boris became aware that I was there — I was probably the only subscriber to the Ververt in that part of the world, certainly that close to the Mekong Delta — and he asked me to make some videos as he was starting to revitalize the Forverts through its digital offerings among other things. So I started to make these videos called “A New York Jew in China,” in Yiddish, about where I was, the Jewish communities, but also just general experiences. I was both kind of going deeper into Yiddish, which was still very much a second language to me, at the same time, as I was researching endangered languages in eastern Himalaya.
One thing that really comes through in reading this is all the parallels between what we think of as a New York, Jewish immigrant story and some of these newer groups.
You see parallel forms coming up, but then also parallel challenges. How do you interest the next generation? How do you maintain the organization as people might be moved to larger, pan-ethnic organizations or just move away from the community altogether?
Learning about how communities today are dealing with these challenges has shed light on both particularities but also the shared characteristics with what Yiddish speakers were going through, in that major wave when my family came between the 1880s and the 1920s.
Yiddish played [a role] in the reception of refugees and survivors in the 1940s and ’50s, [and] in the coming of Soviet Jews in the 1970s and ’80s, where Yiddish was still able to play an important bridging role between different communities and different waves of immigrants.
Now there is an extraordinary linguistic revitalization story going on with Hasidic Yiddish, especially in Brooklyn and upstate, and this is something that I think other communities are now also looking at —how a community rebuilt itself. These were survivors largely from the Holocaust, who have now made Yiddish into one of the youngest language in New York and it’s going into the fourth or fifth generation here, which is highly unusual for immigrant languages.
Boris’ secular Yiddish is more imperiled. Hasidic Yiddish meets that intergenerational transmission metric and you wrote that ‘it’s a potential model that at the same time is troublingly tied with separatism and superiority.’ Do you think that always has to be the case or always is the case with Hasidic Yiddish?
I do think that in almost every language revitalization situation, to bring back a language and grow a language that is not officially supported by the state and that doesn’t have all the resources, requires some passionate sense of sovereignty, a deep desire for some degree of of separateness, and a sense of perhaps a special mission connected with the group and the language.
It’s certainly possible as secular Yiddishists are doing, and as many other language activists do, to continue using a language in very rich, symbolic, sometimes post-vernacular ways just through love of the language and through organizations. But to continue using something as a daily vernacular in as many spheres of life as possible is something that I think requires a deeper motivations as well as the set of institutions that then grow out of it, like having a whole system of Yeshivas for instance.
What other Jewish languages are around the city — I know in a writeup in The New York Times Juhuri was featured.
Almost every Jewish language is represented in the New York area, with a few exceptions or ones that we don’t know about. We had a project where we interviewed about a dozen of the remaining speakers about the history of Ladino in New York, which flourished among thousands of speakers in different boroughs with all kinds of complexities and a media in Ladino, a press and so on.
Driver, [was] featured in that Times piece with our friend Irkhiil Mardakhayev, who has been teaching the language in Brooklyn. These are speakers of a language which at least is distantly related to Persian spoken in Azerbaijan and Pakistan by the so-called Mountain Jews, who have mostly come to Israel or Brooklyn.
The Bukharian Jewish community many people have heard of, and may know that probably the single largest concentration of them is in Queens but may not know that there is a distinctive Bukhari, a kind of Jewish version of Tajik, which is part of that community’s multilingualism along with Russian and Uzbek and Hebrew and English.
Jews of Iran, there’s also a lot of linguistic complexity, highly endangered languages that our colleague Habib Borjian has been a pioneer in researching, but we’ve recorded a number of them as spoken in Great Neck in Long Island and Queens. Judeo-Shirazi, Judeo-Ispahani, these particular quite distinct varieties that were maintained by Jewish communities that differ from the Persian of Tehran. There’s the forms of Jewish New Aramaic as well and Judeo-Arabic spoken by Jews who were in Arabic-speaking lands with a particular kind of Jewish twist to them. Many of these are really highly endangered at this point, hard in a number of ways to record and document. We’ve been able to do some of that on a shoestring but there’s so much to be done.
The book starts saying languages are being “hounded out of existence.” You make clear a lot of this is the after effect of Trump. Did you hear what he said at the rally the other day? “We have languages coming into our country — we don’t have one instructor in our entire nation that can speak that language.”
Several people have speculated to me that he might have seen that article in The Times, that somebody might have given him a copy of Language Cityand I’ve been working on a response. He certainly has not been a friend of linguistic diversity in the past, but I think this is a new note from him about “languages coming into our country,” as he said, and he was quite right, actually, that we don’t have instructors in those languages and that we don’t have really the capacity we should have to teach or interpret or learn them. So, you know, I hope it leads to more funding for teacher training and linguistic research in a Trump administration.
On a more serious note, Trump is just one person. But there is an element of the far-right these days that supports an English only movement, that wants to make English a part of an immigration points-based System that fears Spanish, in particular, but perhaps all languages that are not English, and the idea of fearing a language — language is an expressive code. It’s a human creation of a great sort of art and subtlety. Of course, the point is about the speakers and the people fear the speakers, but it is a dark moment and a dark note. That’s why I end the book with the question of whether we’re at peak linguistic diversity. We can celebrate that New York is the most linguistically diverse city in the world and cities everywhere have become more diverse, that we’re all enriched by this on many levels, but we don’t know whether that will last and what will happen now.
There is a note of some foreboding, a question especially now in the 100th anniversary of the 1924 Immigration Act, which closed the doors to Jewish immigrants as well as other Southern and Eastern Europeans, really to anybody who was not in Northern or Western European with essentially racist quotas. We’re in the 100th anniversary of that, so it’s possible to imagine something similar happening in this election year where immigration is at the top of the agenda.
