 I'm Laura Griment and I'm the Director of the Center for Spatial Research here in the architecture school. So we are in the sixth floor of the architecture building, but our architects kind of spread out across all kinds of buildings in the, across Columbia. And in this room we have an incredibly interdisciplinary group, so we have a lot of people from anthropology, from the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. We have some economics majors, we have urban designers, architects, curatorial studies. And the reason we have such a diverse group is because Lydia Liu, co-teacher and I, each have grants from the Mellon, from Mellon Asia. Mine is called Architecture, Urbanism and Humanities. The mandate of both the center and the brand is to teach methods of critical mapping, digital mapping, and data visualization across the humanities, including architecture. And part of the research mission of this four year grant or the research topic that we proposed is conflict urbanism. So every year in the spring we run a conflict urbanism seminar. Last year it was conflict urbanism and I collaborated with Shalom and Art History. And if you go to the website and you look at the work that's got done there, you'll be able to kind of make some incredibly great groups of students. And then go to the seminar, you kind of workshop some of the work that's in the seminar and we did better and developed it. And then we just came up with a new direction for the summer as well, which I hope will happen this summer too. And so this summer, this spring, if the topic is conflict urbanism, I would suggest this, right? So we both probably come to that, although that conflict means urbanism and war, but actually really that. So we're also looking at everyday conflicts that occur on days, as we know. I think that about percent of the world is now urbanized and there's all kinds of injustices and inequities that occur as cities become, as more people on my regular form, rural areas, two cities. And so Sharon Marcus, she's not here today, she's the co-PI on the smelling grant and in our committee where we were discussing who we should be working with, Sharon suggested Lydia because they had just put together this project on language justice, which she will explain. But the reason that I'm so excited about collaborating on this conflict urbanism and language justice is because Lydia has really defined language more as an ecology rather than a series of signs and symbols. And that immediately locates it in an urban setting because we think about how is language sustainable economically, culturally, socially, etc. And so I'll introduce Lydia. And then after Lydia, Michelle McSweeney is actually a post-doc, we'll call her a post-doc in the central world for spatial research. And she comes from the linguistics background but also has the digital humanities that focuses on digital humanities through the linguistics group. And so she has worked incredible expertise and is also teaching a series of workshops directly catered to urbanism and language in New York City. So all of our students this semester are going to be studying language in New York City. And you will see why very soon we've invited Dan that will be completely self-evident. Hi everybody. It's good to see such a mixed crowd. People are interested in so many aspects of language. As Laura said, the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society recently received a Mellon grant. It's a two-year seminar on the subject of global language justice. And so we take a relatively different approach to the problem of language as we recognize the rapid decline of Indigenous languages and also the correlations of the decline of the world's languages with the decline of biospecies. And so I think that our scholars were pursuing the studies of these subjects and so by definition the study of ecology of language is interdisciplinary. But unlike Laura's project which started two years ago, right, we are about to start. This is a new project that will kick off in the fall of this year. So you will hear from us in the fall and we'll have a major poetry event. We'll invite poets from all over the world to read their work in their own original languages. So literature is part of it. And we will have also a series of lectures like the one we're having today, this semester, and a series of workshops. And we will also have a post-doc fellow who's a graduate student so those of you who are interested in working on the subject. So we would love to have you join us. And I'm very happy to be teaching this course with Laura and with Michelle Czuny. Both teaching the course and learning how to visualize data. He's actually taking the workshop. I'm taking the workshop so learning how to navigate through this very complicated suburb space. I won't take up too much of your time. I'm eager to hear what Dan Kaufman has to say about his current research on the native languages. And so I will invite Michelle to come and introduce Professor Kaufman. Thank you. So as has already been stated, a large part of the reason that this speaker series is existing is to understand how languages and cities come together. So it's a huge honor and a huge pleasure for me to be able to introduce Dan Kaufman today. Partially because he helped shape my early graduate career, but also because he has worked on preserving, documenting, and raising awareness of endangered languages in New York City over at least as long as I can. So at least since 2008 and probably earlier. And he's been the director of the endangered language alliance, formerly the urban field station for linguistic research. And in that role he's contributed immensely to public awareness of the sheer variety of languages spoken in New York City. And why language matters to the whole of our city. And then he is now also an assistant professor at Queen's College where he's establishing the language documentation lab to train students in documentation and research. So please join me in welcoming Professor Dan Kaufman. Thank you all of you for coming. Thanks to Michelle Laurel-Lidia for inviting me. It's my first time to talk in an architecture school. First of all to be introduced by three people. So I wanted to talk about it. I wanted to introduce, since a few of you are linguists I think, I wanted to introduce the notion of language endangerment and endangered languages. How they become endangered, why it's important. And then talk of course about New York City and all of the urban issues that are being explored in this larger series and this project. So I'll first kind of work backwards maybe just to just briefly what the organization does. Michelle mentioned the endangered language alliance and then talk a little bit about language endangerment as a phenomenon and then move to New York City. These are the questions I promised to talk about in the abstract. Don't quote me to it. I'd like to talk about where do New York City's endangered languages come from. What phenomena have driven them here. Do the languages have chances of survival in the diaspora setting like New York City. How widespread is the problem of language isolation? I doubt I'll have much time to talk about that. Can immigrant communities in New York City have a positive effect on language prestige and transmission back in the homeland? And what is the future of New York City's linguistic diversity? And I also want to talk about of course the mapping issues that are central to this project. Moving backwards as I said, so what does our organization do? We're very much interested in literacy and supporting people's mother tongues in New York City. Communities that have no official support, speakers of languages that are unwritten, regional languages that are not official languages. We're interested in supporting those people to help them continue their languages in New York City. We're very much interested in documenting those languages and that's where most of our effort goes. Documenting those languages in audio and video, recording stories, narratives, poetry in some cases. In languages that have never been recorded well in some cases before. This is a collaborator of ours, Sanaydha Kanthu speaks Pao, which is an indigenous Mexican language from Guerrero, Mexico. Indigenous radio is something we're also involved in, so we have programs on internet radio in mind language and in Garifuna as well. That's a small thing that happens and also pedagogical materials as well. And performance, we try to support performance in indigenous languages. This is a performance in Tontemboan, I mean Hassan language, a language that is not really spoken widely. Even within the region it comes from in Indonesia. Yes, performance, well this relates to the literary side of the project. So poetry is another thing that we're interested in and we're trying to promote. Trying to get people who speak oral languages that have not been written down traditionally to write their languages and even to try and publish some of that work. So this is a performance of Irish, which is a language of a long written history. So that's kind of in a nutshell what our organization does and what we're interested in doing. As I said, our main focus is really on documentation, recording, archiving, endangered languages in New York City. To give you just a rough idea of what language endangerment looks like, globally there exists between 6,000 and 7,000 languages in the world today. 95% of the world's people speak around 5% of the world's languages and it's estimated that between half or up to 90% of the world's languages will be gone by the end of the century. And I'll get into the reasons in a second. In addition, there's fewer and fewer languages being actually born, just something that is not spoken up nearly as much, but you can imagine the kind of conditions that give rise to language diversity, rich ecological environments, islands, rainforests, things like that. Those areas are no longer what they used to be, obviously. And so not only are languages disappearing, there seems to be very little future for new languages. So what creates language diversity, as I said, biologically rich environments allow small groups to survive and to get involved independently. A few square miles of rainforests can allow a population to survive relatively independently and thus the evolution of their culture and the way of speaking can lead to a new language after hundreds or thousands of years. So biodiversity leads to linguistic diversity. On the other hand, large states require large-scale agriculture and agriculture leads to biological leveling and dependency on the state economy. So what ends up happening is the leveling of linguistic diversity really does mirror that biodiversity. Biologists estimate that the extinction of species is now occurring at a rate 1,000 times greater than that in the pre-industrial era and something comparable is happening with languages as well. And the connection is quite clear. As societies become agricultural and as they further become industrial, people are no longer able to survive the way they used to in the traditional livelihoods and villages and they're forced into cities to make a living, to earn cash, to pay for things like schooling. And they're taken out of their language area basically. That's a big factor in language loss. So UNESCO has come up with the following criteria because now that people have started to care over the last 40, 50 years, these things have to be measured and that's what the UN has to do that. So UNESCO comes up with criteria which are more or less well accepted. The most important factor is not the size of a language or the size of a language population. It's actually transmission. So you can have a language population of 200 or 3,500 million speakers but if the language isn't being transmitted to children, then things can change very rapidly in the course of one or two generations. So intergenerational transmission is the number one factor. These are ranked in important quarters. And then the absolute number of speakers. And then the proportion of speakers within the total population because that makes a difference as to how much power that people have. Shifts in domains of language use. So that's for instance if education comes into a rural place and now only the official language is allowed in schools. That's a large shift in domain. People can no longer use their language for most of the day. Response to new domains in media. So texting for instance is great throughout the world over the last 10, 15 years. Whether people choose their local language or their national language or a global language in text is hard to guess but it has a very powerful effect on the future of the language. The availability of materials for language education, governmental and institutional language attitudes, community members' attitudes towards their own language. Some communities find language to be an inextricable part of their identity. In some rare cases community may just look at a language as a historical relic. That obviously affects the future of the language and the amount and quality of documentation. Is a language recorded? Is it described? If there's very few speakers can the community go back to that language and they hear that language. So things can change very rapidly as I said. To give one concrete example, when we started recording different communities here in New York City one of the groups we were working with was an individual working with, he was a speaker of Neo-Iron-Mate from Iraq. Now seven years ago or so, Neo-Iron-Mate was already considered by UNESCO's severely endangered language or they definitely have one of these rankings. Definitely endangered, that's one step away from severely. But within the last seven years, and you have something today like 240,000 speakers. There's a very large number of Neo-Iron-Mate. But over the last seven years, Mosul which was their biggest population center was taken by ISIS and everything completely changed. So now the entire population, almost without exception, is out of their area, their homeland in the area around Mosul and they're in Kurdistan and Turkey and other areas. So within just a course of five years the language has become apparently untenable if things continue the way they are. If we look at language depth, just to give you kind of two edges of the spectrum, which I think are, it is a spectrum and I think it's important to think about the two extremes. So on one extreme you find colonialism and genocide. So this is the last speaker of Stoloha Pomelem Salish, the indigenous language of British Columbia and Canada. And the way this language became endangered was through the residential boarding school and all the policies that were almost identical in Canada than in the United States. This happens to be just a recent example. She happens to be the last speaker of a language that was mentioned recently in the news, but one can find similar stories almost every month. So they summarize her story as this. When Elizabeth Phillips was a child, she was put into St. Mary's Indian Residential School in Mission. She was forbidden to speak the language that both of her parents spoke to her as a baby. Phillips was a loner at the school and supervising nuns became concerned that she wasn't associated with other children enough. When her children played, she would stand alone at the outside gate staring out at the Fraser River and thinking in her language. And I guess that's what saved me, she says now, sitting outside her home in Fraser Valley. And this turns out to be actually a very common story. It's really now the individuals that linguists and community members flock to because they're the last speakers. Those are the people who really escaped the residential schools. The residential schools were designed to erase the culture and the language of indigenous Americans both in Canada and the United States. They went by different names, but the main idea was to turn them into European Americans. This is just to illustrate what those schools were all about. The Carlisle Indian School was one of the most famous ones. It was founded in 1879 by Colonel Pratt, whose famous for saying, kill the Indian and save the man. And this is the kind of before and after picture of Tom Torlino, who was a Navajo. And this was the before picture. He entered the school in something like 1879, and this is supposed to show him as what was perceived as a wild savage with long hair and dark skin. And then after a few years in the Carlisle Indian School, not only does he go on a suit and have short hair, he even becomes wider as I'm not. It's how amazing that school was. And that was one of the central schools and they forced children from many tribes throughout the United States to enter there. And as I said, the goal was really to erase the language. That was a big goal, but not only the culture, but especially the language. On the other side of the spectrum, there's this idea that languages can kind of commit suicide. So just to sum that up, Dennis, from a quote by Dennis, says, the speech community sometimes decides for reasons of functional economy to suppress a part of itself. There comes a point when multilingual parents no longer consider it necessary or worthwhile for the future of their children to communicate with them in a low prestige language variety. And when children are no longer motivated to acquire active competence in language which is lacking in positive connotations, such as youth, modernity, technical skills, material success, education. The language at the lower end of the prestige scale retreat from ever increasing areas of their earlier functional domains, displaced by higher prestige languages until there's nothing left for them to be appropriately used about. In this sense, they may be said to commit suicide. So there's several linguists who believe in this idea of language suicide, and I think if you ask the average person, of course the average person hasn't really thought about language endangerment, I guess, but in as much as anybody has, they would probably say something like this. Once in a while, they do interview people on the street about these topics, and they come up with something like this, that, oh yeah, languages become useless and people decide to stop passing it down to their children. It's very much a question, though, when you really look at individual stories and you dig a little deeper about their language suicide as ever, ever really happens, right? Or if it's really a case of coercion, even if it's not official coercion in the style of the Carlisle Indian School, lower level coercion that forces communities to develop their language. So more on the side of language suicide, you can find a community like this, which is a small fishing village in Scotland, and they were, this is the Cromartie dialect of English. It's an English dialect, which is almost, I would say, a different language. And these people were not the victims of genocide or colonialism, and yet they spoke a language that died out in 2012. This was the last speaker of the Cromartie dialect. And the Cromartie dialect was just as interesting as anything. It had many influences, not only from Celtic languages, but also from Phrygian and Dutch. Many terms about fishing and the natural environment that were found in Scott's English. Well, I'll give you a little and see if this works. Well, before the school, I took the time of the school, and then I could do, as somebody did, that says, oh, well, I've got a lot of work to do here. So like, I can do what you all do, but it's something different. And then when you're in the Cromartie, you're shown in the lens again. This is a dialect of English at the end or not, but it's essentially a separate language, right? And even though the relationship to the community may be quite different than, say, the relationship to one of the people who sail-ish, it's still representative of the way of life and identity. And for linguists, it's also quite interesting, right? If you look at this, it's actually just in this wonderful sentence of Cromartie, there's several linguistic features that are actually quite interesting from the perspective of studying English, right? So this is another, on the other end of the spectrum. And if you look deeper, you probably would find that there was coercion and teasing and things that were kind of below the surface that led to the death of Cromartie. Okay. So what we lose when we lose a language, I think the area that's been discussed most in the literature is things like botanical knowledge, environmental knowledge that's encapsulated in the lexiconical language and the words of the language. You also have the entire world tradition of the language, the songs, the poetry, the history, the things that are not written down and the things which typically disappear when their linguistic vehicle disappears. And you also have linguistic knowledge, of course, right? Which is of most interest to linguists. And that includes sound patterns and grammatical patterns. That's what linguists care about. And then you have something which is more intangible, which is identity, the identity factor, right? To give just an idea of what that is. This was a quote from a language activist, a Manchu language activist in North China, who realized that later in life that they were Manchu and said at some point you realize that the first language you're speaking isn't your mother tongue. You feel like an orphan. You want to find your mother. So this is a more subtle, maybe purely psychological, internal connection to language. But it's just as important as anything else. And I think that this is the factor that's most often lost over when we talk about endangered languages. Just to give an idea of what linguists are interested in, the beaker inside, maybe. This is two words of Kabardian, which is a Circassian language, an indigenous language of the Caucasus area in the Caucasus. And these are two words, right? And within these two words, this is what you call a lost sentence and interlinearized lost sentence. And here you have the transcription of the word and this represents the meaning of each part of the word. And this is the meaning. So in English, you have a full sentence. I showed you to him. Or we're going for a long walk. But in Kabardian, this is expressed in a single word. If you look at the second word, in particular, you'll see just how rich the grammar is. Within this single word, you have all of these morphemes that have a slight... They invoke something different about the movement. So it's movement along a groove. It's somehow distributed movement. There's direction. There's an outward movement. There's a turning movement. And all of these things are just affixes within the word. So the kind of richness that leads to this very complex word structure I think can be compared to a forest or some intense area, the area of intense biological diversity. Something that takes millennia to develop, right? This is not something that you would find in a language that could be developed overnight. In order to get this, you really have to have intergenerational transmission uninterrupted for thousands of years. So this is kind of the loss that we're looking at linguistically when these languages disappear. Okay, so that's my brief introduction to language endangerment. I wanted to talk specifically about New York City since, of course, that's what everybody loves for some reason. I love hate. So the two most interesting communities, I think from a perspective of endangered languages are the Mexican community and the larger Himalayan community. In terms of linguistic density and linguistic diversity, it's really these two places in the world that give New York City the most languages, right? These are two of the most linguistically diverse and dense places in the world. So let's start with Mexico. Just to compare some neighboring countries with what that diversity actually looks like, Panama has 14 languages. Several of them are in trouble or die. Nicaragua has 11 languages. Honduras has 10 languages. El Salvador has four. Mexico has 282 indigenous languages. Almost all of them are indigenous. 32 of those are deemed by the ethnologue, the largest catalog of linguistic information, as dying and 87 are in trouble. Those are probably conservative figures. I would say that more than that are endangered. But it gives you the rough idea of how much diversity there is in this one country, right? Not only is there a tremendous number of languages, but there's also a tremendous genetic diversity. So unlike most of Europe, most of the European languages belong to Indo-European, in this one country, in Mexico, you find all of these language families. So these families are completely unrelated to each other, or at least we haven't found a way to relate them yet. Honduras, Tekken, Yuman, Pochimi, but the Nacan, the Mangan, et cetera, all of these are completely independent language families that have nothing to do with each other. There's really an unprecedented level of linguistic diversity in this one country. Where is that diversity in Mexico? This is a language map of Mexico, and you can see the different colors are all different languages, and you can see that as of today, the vast majority of linguistic diversity is in the south, right, in that little corner in the south, right? And those states are the state of Oaxaca and Guerrero, mostly. And that turns out to be exactly the states that have the most immigration to New York. To give a quick overview of what language policy was like in Mexico, you have basically 300 years of suppression and assimilation as we had in the United States and Canada and elsewhere. And then finally, in 1936, linguistic diversity is recognized, but it's only really in 2000, beginning in the 80s, but only really in 2000, that you have stronger national institutions that are attached to defending these languages and conserving them. So by that time, for many languages, it was already too late. The attitudes towards the languages were similar in Latin America as they were in the United States. So the first quote here is actually referring to Native Americans. Atkins, who was also involved in the residential school system, said, in the difference of language today, lies two-thirds of our trouble. Schools should be established, which children should be required to attend. Their barber's dialects should be blotted out and the English language substituted. This was the colonial English approach. And then 100 years later, the president of Guatemala says something similar, but this was just representative. Really, this was nothing special about him. We must go away with the word Indian or indigenous. Our mission requires the integration of all Guatemalans. So it still is typical of the attitudes towards assimilation, that it should be a subtractive process. It should be removing indigenous identity. And then surprisingly, to bring it back to New York, Herman Vadeo was at the time the board of trustees chair for CUNY in the University of New York said the problem was that in Mexico and Central America, there's never been a tradition of education. These incas and Mayans were about five feet tall and straight here. And when they speak about La Raza, they're not talking about the Spanish language, they're talking about the original Indian language. And therefore it's a far more complicated problem than the problem we used to deal with. So 100 years difference between the first quote and this quote and many, many changes between them, of course, but the attitudes still basically remain the same. These people need to be assimilated and their indigenous cultures need to be removed because they're an obstacle an obstacle to education. I don't mean to pick on that. All right. So the indigenous population on the list is growing, right? Even though it's a literate population, it's growing and now in the 2000 census there were 407,000 people nationwide who identified as Latinos of indigenous origin in 2010 it was a 68% increase to 685,000. So to what extent that is real? To what extent that reflects immigration or just a change in self-identification we will never know. But that gives you some idea of either a change in consciousness or also increased immigration from the indigenous areas of Mexico. So again back to the details of New York you have another interesting phenomenon here which is that in Mexico itself only 6% of Mexicans speak in indigenous language according to their Euro statistics. But based on the survey that was done in the consulate here they found something like 17%, over 17% of the people who came to for consular services spoke in indigenous language. So that's almost three times the rate and it's probably actually much more than that because the people who seek services in the consulate are already those who speak to people. So there's three more proportions are very different here in New York. You have much more indigenous languages of Mexico spoken in New York proportion wise than in Mexico. So the estimate would be something like 86, over 86,000 speakers of indigenous Mexican languages. I wanted to play this. Maybe I won't play it in totality but this leads me to my next point if it's audible I'll summarize it. So because actual information is extremely scarce on indigenous communities in New York City Mexican communities what we have to do is really through interviews and more qualitative methods find out what people are speaking are the differences in the community here in back calling and all the kind of sociolinguistic information we're interested in. There's something interesting came up in this interview he did which was the person on the far right who's the speaker from Misteco said that here in New York he said that as a matter of course he speaks Misteco in his language at home and with his daughter and with his wife and with all of his friends and at work but then when he talked about working in Acapulco which is just not far at all from where his village is he said oh no we would never speak Misteco there because there people would laugh at you people would say what is this crazy Indian talking that's what he said more or less so that's an interesting phenomenon because the languages are more removed socially and culturally New York City there's actually occasionally more of an opportunity to use them there's less of a stigma to use them in New York than there is back home in some cases so a language like this which would be highly stigmatized in Acapulco he does actually have the freedom to use it about fearing ridicule so that's one of the things we're interested in his language turns out to be quite important in New York City so that some of the Mexican languages in New York that we've worked with are Misteco, Triki, Musco, Aneko, Masete, Sateco, Bucateco, Bichina, Tecna, Acapulco, and Tepewa but the majority of languages here are Misteco and because as I'll discuss in a second their area was really devastated by several environmental factors so Misteco their area in Mexico has been declared an ecological disaster zone by the World Bank you have something like a million acres ruined by soil erosion and as a result one of the lowest corn productivity rates in Mexico and following that NAFTA came and radically reduced the price of corn and bankrupted indigenous farmers as a result you have a massive out migration of this area from La Misteca in Mexico it ends up being the poorest zones in all of Latin America there's malnutrition and empty villages as a result you have areas that have lost over 80% of their population so most of the indigenous immigrants from Pereira and Oaxaca New York come from this background of extreme poverty the situation is summed up pretty well by an interesting photography project in the area really focusing on these empty villages where people have fled to New York and Los Angeles and other places and he put in perspective that chances are high that the food you've eaten recently was picked by the Misteca immigrant he's probably undocumented and he probably earned far less than minimum wage for that work his community back home is most likely in an advanced stage of depopulation and if the current trajectory continues his culture and language among the oldest in all of the Americas will likely disappear in the next generation or two so that kind of sums it up people fled their villages in order to do mostly agricultural labor in California and in New York working in kitchens and other menial labor there was all of a sudden a great concern about Mexican educational statistics in New York City after an article by Semple in 2011 where he noted that there was a very high dropout rate in the Mexican community much higher than any other immigrant community so there was a high school dropout rate of higher than 20% the dropout rate was something like 9% no other immigrant group had a rate higher than 20% in the Mexican-American community had a rate of 41% so this was kind of an alarm and it was said that the city may have a large Mexican underclass for generations and many of the Mexicans within this population are indigenous and that turns out to be part of the issue here because a lot of indigenous Mexicans as we've discovered are actually being left back at record rates this wasn't noted at all in the article but this was a major I think a major contributor to the problem they're typically misidentified as Spanish speakers in the school system teachers, administrators don't know anything about indigenous languages Mexican languages they think that only Spanish is spoken in Mexico when the kids don't speak Spanish class then they put them in Spanish class then they don't really speak Spanish either and then they're left back so it's misconstrued often as a learning disorder and then they're put in special ed so this is a major issue for talking about language justice then the ignorance around indigenous languages and the educational consequences of that ignorance are a very serious issue in New York City slightly more abstractly there's different ideologies that play a role so there's ideologies about language learning that are different across nationalities ethnicities, social classes if you look at the more economically successful immigrant groups Korean, Chinese, Russian, French Spanish, English speakers they subtracted assimilation was never a big part of their communities in New York the Chinese community had Chinese school the green community has Korean school the English was promoted to a smaller extent, Spanish, French all of these languages had support and so it never took root really this idea that you had to lose your culture in order to succeed in America but that is the model for people coming from post-colonial societies where that is a common theme especially among indigenous populations that you have to abandon your language and abandon your culture to get ahead and that ideology is brought to New York that's the model so that sums up some of those issues to move to mapping something maybe happier this was a math that we helped make for Joshua Gellich here a recent Atlas nonstop metropolis a New York City Atlas it was a book I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with many different very interesting creative maps of different all kinds of things and this was the language map you could look at this was the New York's most linguistically dense area, let's see around here Jackson Heights, Elmhurst area the zip code for Jackson Heights is actually the most linguistically dense zip code in all of the United States it's not an extension I think world so what is this actually does this really represent reality in some sense yeah so you have the larger national languages in orange and we know that they're centered in those areas but then within those language group within those national communities you have many local languages and mapping those is actually possible right so now I've divulged the truth behind this map because a lot of this is really fitting words where there's space because there is no Chabacano or Wari Wari area or local area there's a Filipino area there's an Indonesian area there's a Greek area but there aren't really communities, physical communities for original languages in Jackson Heights there's national communities so some of the difficulties in mapping hopefully some of you or the project can tackle these problems I think that is this distinction between physical communities right we know where those are the Italian community here every community there and these atomized communities if they're communities at all they're really collections of individuals they're not grouping together another problem is transnational communities you do have ethnic groups and language groups that span across countries and how do you map those how do you map a language that belongs to several countries or give an example a little later and also locating these embedded communities which is the biggest problem of all is there anything to locate in the first place and if there is that these are languages that nobody puts down in the census form because they think why would anybody care people from my own country don't even know this language why would the government know this language so official data on regional languages non-official languages is almost not so what we've been interested in or I've been interested in in particular is looking at language maintenance and to what extent these languages are changing in New York City what extent they're mixing diaspora settings Joshua Fishman who's a famous linguist noted that in the vast majority of cases languages of immigrant communities are lost in two generations that was the limit he gave you can't keep a language without some spectacular effort or separation like the Amish or Yiddish speakers very rarely keep a language more than two generations in a diaspora setting so I'm interested in this question of can smaller languages but this observation or not and what happens to these languages that are actually small language families like Tibetan and Mixteco which I mentioned they have a tremendous amount of internal diversity so Tibet spoke a little bit about Mexico but the other main donor of linguistic diversity to New York is Himalayan languages and now we're talking about Nepal mostly so Himalayan languages mostly languages we're looking at belong to the Tibetan-Burman group which is distantly related to Chinese but very very different from Chinese and we're looking at this under the auspices of this project the voices of the Himalayas project which is led by Naum Guru who is here in the back if you want to speak to him and we're looking at a population of around 20,000 people who are living in Queens and Brooklyn and it goes to document the languages as they're spoken here and also the social history of the community it's a new community that's only arrived in the last 15-20 years in March numbers within that community the Mustani community is of special interest because relatively they have a very large presence here there's around 3,000 Mustani who speak a Tibetan language in two varieties lower and upper and in Nepal there's many monolinguals in more isolated areas but younger people are shifting to Nepal we're interested I'm particularly interested in these cases of individuals learning their heritage language in New York that's a kind of unexpected thing you have a younger person who's already shifted to the major language the main language they come to New York and then surprisingly in many cases they shift back to their heritage language how does that happen and why does that happen and does that give some hope for endangered languages in New York City so this was one interview we did which is a case like that there were more and more of our people here so I had a real chance to talk to them in Mustani and I got to know the language very well and to my surprise this turned out to be a more common story than I had ever imagined so just to look at another interesting fact that relates to mapping in this community so this is Nepal in the middle there, India on the bottom and the Tibetan region of China on the top and Bhutan and Bangladesh as you see and we're interested in this little square there which includes the Mustang region this is the same map but with elevations so you see that we're well on top of the Tibetan plateau there so this is the little square I showed here so if we zoom into there that is the area of Mustang that little valley this area on top is Upper Mustang and the bottom is Lower Mustang and this is all in this Annapurna conservation area this is a map from Charles Campbell's book on the history of the region so let me just say as I mentioned there's two main dialects in this small area there's the upper dialect which is basically the top half and then there's the lower dialect which is the bottom half and then there's also all kinds of other little variations and within the lower half there's a language called Sekhe around that area that's grayed out there that is the Sekhe language which is a separate language so interestingly and surprisingly this map of Mustang actually maps perfectly to New York City so you have Upper Mustang in the Jackson Heights area and you have Lower Mustang around New York and I thought this was a joke originally when I first met Nawang when I first met Nawang we were going to make a recording I asked him where most of the Mustanis live and he said oh above this certain elevation Queens and below this certain elevation they go to Brooklyn and I thought it was a joke but it turned out to be true so below a certain elevation in the Himalayas people go to Brooklyn and then most surprisingly the few Sekhe speakers I noticed that that gray area was a different language so the few Sekhe speakers in New York live within this lower this lower community this community from Lower Mustang in Brooklyn so how does this happen urban planners you tell me how could I say was this planned is this done on purpose any ideas social networks yeah networks right it's the size of the networks so you have this replication it was quite surprising it almost looks like it was done on purpose of course nobody could predict that the Northern group would actually end up more North in New York City that part is unpredictable but you can actually predict that you would find these two areas most unmapping to different areas in New York City and that a group that is within a subgroup of one would be a subgroup also in New York City if you think about it as maybe through agent-based modeling or just very small networks people are staying with their relatives so immigration is relying on very small family units that don't really extend for outside the village so the geographic distributions are really copied from the homeland in New York City where originally somebody comes they don't have money they have to stay with a relative a close relative generally so if people are intermarrying within the village and not too far out of the village then you'll have to rely on somebody that comes from your area so in that way through these very small family networks you can get these patterns replicated so it's actually not a miracle actually quite logical you'll find a similar case in this transnational community the Garifuna community they're an indigenous Afro-indigenous group from Central America and they're along the Central American coast but they belong to Honduras and Belize and Guatemala and Nicaragua as well and here in New York they also follow their national community so for instance the ones that come from Belize are in the larger Caribbean community the Garifuna who come from Honduras and Guatemala end up in bronze with a larger Central American Spanish-speaking community so that's another way in which a certain division in the homeland was mapped onto New York City and again it has to do with the size of the networks small family networks can create that pattern other patterns as well which I can't talk about other patterns are replicated as well a recent talk that I saw here a few months ago showed that the disparities in nutrition and malnutrition in indigenous communities in Mexico versus mestizo populations are replicated in New York City totally new city totally new work environment but the same differences between indigenous and mestizo populations back home are mapped onto here and this was actually measured by Dr. Manguello who did studies of malnutrition in New York City to end and probably over time and over time what's the future of diversity in New York City let's end with this horrible picture so we have around 600 languages here the only thing we estimate far upwards of what the census has so far counted is estimated to my colleague Juliet Blevins co-founder of the Endangered Language Alliance at this point I think it's pretty obvious and I had thought this even before the current administration came to power was that New York City had already reached some peak diversity as far as languages were concerned for several reasons but mostly the flow of immigration has changed rapidly over the last 15-20 years but now it's totally obvious that we've reached peak diversity linguistically especially in terms of the languages I've been talking about here these numbers are only one to go down from here the ongoing crackdown for some immigrants will certainly have a large effect on the endangered languages under speakers indigenous communities from Mexico are being targeted as we know and profiled just over the last month so any discussion of language justice and I'll end here I think should include seeking a way for the recognition of these populations both Mexican, Malay and others as bearers of endangered languages and cultures and hoping that if people can change their view of these communities maybe naively hoping that if people can understand the larger cultural and linguistic context that somehow changed the way that they are valued or devalued and I think sorry you mentioned that the rate of new languages being born has slowed down you mentioned that the rate of new languages being born has slowed down a lot recently does that mean there's still new languages I guess arising and what are what's the mechanism for that is it always derived from another language and at what point do you decide that it's a new language? A language can arise from normal means if you give biological speciation you can have a group that just goes off on their own and slowly changes the language changes slowly but then you can also have creolization when you have different groups coming together or coming up with new languages pigeon languages which are kind of makeshift languages used to communicate across languages so in that sense you still have new languages and we've been looking at something that's called Ramali which is a goat and sheep it's called goat and sheep which means a kind of derogatory way of saying a mixed up language and that's kind of a new maybe a new dialect that's a kind of mix of different dialects so I wouldn't say that that's a new language but you could see potentially a new dialect arising even in New York City through mixing of different languages especially with these highly multilingual languages. You also talked about the one of the mechanisms for language that being that the language no longer has some kind of social prestige if you go for children learning it that it isn't like basically cool to speak there because of that I'm wondering if like language restoration projects like the one that you do are there I guess what are the ways that you try to make the language more attractive to learn for children what kind of strategies do you have? So, well first of all the real work on the front is really in the communities themselves so we don't have much hope that we really idolize the language in New York City and we mostly can support it through the things I showed in the beginning but there is a lot of effort being given to creating new media, electronic media in indigenous languages so just the act of creating a YouTube video or the process of texting in the language can in many ways increase its prestige you have to realize that for many of these communities the unwritten languages the languages that have lost the writing system there is sometimes this idea that the language has no grammar there are no rules it's just something we speak there are rules but these languages were just the way we speak so just the act of putting it on paper or doing these other electronic things with them is a big step toward seeing them as equal with national languages so definitely musical things and performance things like that there has been a lot of people looking to hip hop in indigenous languages and how that can make the language cool again for the younger generation the show at the Queen's Museum just for the contextual audience of the year because it was a different map it was a different map up there interactive the map that we talked about existed more directly focused on building restaurants restaurants yeah so that map that was an artistic rendition we didn't make that map we gave the data for that map and the artist together a data person created that map and it was some algorithm the colors that we had to do with language family and the size was yeah roughly in New York City so they used data that we had collected but then they turned it into the details of the cardiogram we kind of gave it to them as a few numbers and languages and they did that yeah I don't know looking at it I don't think that anybody would without reading the background nobody would guess that it's a map or it was a service it was too generalized no I think it was artistic statements so as with the text and everything people got the idea but as a map it was quite abstract I'm not a linguist but I read a little bit and I understand that the word dialect has become somewhat complicated and I noticed that you use a page only I'm just wondering what's the status of the concept of dialect in the context of language justice so for linguists the dialect is something that has some level of mutual intelligibility with another related variety so for instance standard British English and standard American English we would say there are two dialects of the same language because we can understand we can understand each other easily so the linguistic definition is completely about mutual intelligibility and can see people understand each other and to what extent if they can't understand each other at all then it's considered two different languages if they can't understand each other somewhat or if they can't understand each other they speak differently they're considered dialects what about that sports one yeah so that's a case of that's not a linguistic definition that's a more popular definition because all varieties of English are called dialects but as we know what was that movie this movie from North England with the strippers this game should be made of strippers made of strippers anyway but they had to have but they had to have sub-titles nobody knows what I'm talking about you know what I'm talking about what was the diamond no that was the other stripper one full monotheism full monotheism anyway they had to have sub-titles so for the language that would be a totally different language but then a dialect takes on a new meaning in Latin America where dialect comes to mean any non-official language or non-written language or anything with Spanish or any indigenous language is called a dialect then that actually becomes a popular term now so even indigenous communities refer to their languages as dialects but that's not a linguistic definition that's kind of a historical colonial definition where a language with something with a grammar and a history and this spoken stuff those were just dialects I'm wondering what thank you I'm wondering what in general do you use the role not only in New York City but back in indigenous communities in Native places where there seems to be a lot of pushback in the national government because of the idea of self-determination and of the indigenous peoples and the separation of the national government's control of them because they have their own identity how the Native English Alliance tries or would try to use their data the documentation that they collect to a transgression and emerge back home yeah so now that everybody is almost everybody is on the internet to some extent there's a lot that we can do 20 years ago it would have been unthinkable but now we can produce media here with a few individuals and hope that it has an effect back home and in some cases it seems to so a recent example was a collaborator who speaks Wahi which is an Iranian language in the area around there we made a video for just a simple video for reading a folktale or improvising a folktale with the translation and transcription and everything and then this last summer she went back home and people would stop her and start reciting the folktale to her the first line of the story somehow that video became really popular and everybody knew about it in her community so that was surprising to me I wouldn't have thought that it would have been that much of a success but in those cases you can have at least that kind of nominal brain gain there's this term brain drain and brain gain where you have this idea that all of the intellectual resources of the country outmigrates and screws over the country of origin but then there's other ideas that there's kind of reverse brain gain which is that things that are learned here things that are able to do in America or other centers of migration can feed back home so to what extent that drain and gain plays out over the next few decades is a question but it will probably play out over the internet things like YouTube thank you so much that was a wonderful lecture I wonder I'm often surprised when I see estimates of languages for instance in New York City is not going to say there are 200 languages in New York City Michelle Laura and I had a brief discussion as to exactly how many and the discrepancy I wonder if the discrepancy has to do with exactly how whether people take I mean we see criteria or political criteria as to what a language is how did you come up for example with an estimate roughly 600 languages curious do you work with UNESCO because they seem to have some criteria they for example the number of languages in the People's Republic of China is 144 but then other languages come up with different figures more than 144 and then I checked some Chinese sources of linguistic journals they say 78 so I wonder how if we stick to a linguistic criteria is it possible to come at a number that almost people would have some concerns at least among the linguistic areas it's hard so there's many factors especially when we talk about the census data but there are linguistic factors so historically there's an idea for instance let's say Tibetan is one language or Steco is one language where clearly it's not it's much more than one language it's like a small language family so in Tibetan we've seen this up close with this in the last project just last week now I was from was interviewing somebody from the Amdo region they were interviewing, he was asking questions and they were answering and it seemed like they were communicating beautifully and afterwards now I'm saying how much I understood 2% so this is supposed to be the same language but actually they're two totally different languages for historical reasons because they all came from classical Tibetan they're considered one language Steco is the same thing according to these macrogroupings for instance in Mexico Mexico is supposed to only have something like 150 languages or something like that when linguists really looked at it and tried to determine on the basis of mutual intelligibility they came up with something like 258 so 100 more languages so that's a real issue it's difficult to say what the difference between the dialect and the language but linguists have worked pretty hard on that I think for some reason some regions it's pretty reliable the other problem when we're looking at number of languages in New York City is that nobody actually feels in their language if it's not already an option so if somebody is from Indonesia they'll check Indonesian they're not going to write down their look because I mentioned earlier it's not even a language I speak much in New York City it's just totally irrelevant so that's another problem how we came up with the number I should pass the microphone to my colleague Juliet Levens who helped come up with that number it was an extrapolation you want to talk about that? well the original number was 800 so I guess we have a little bit more conservative over time what we did was we looked at the largest Indonesian groups one group that Dan Hill didn't talk about tonight was populations from India and surrounding areas India as a country is estimated to have over 100, well over 100 indigenous languages and some of them have very large populations so we were actually very conservative thinking that for instance if there are 150 languages in Mexico maybe half of them would be spoken in New York it turns out there's more we're finding that the figure was low but maybe Dan Hill took comment about India surrounding areas what you're saying about China as well figured into the calculations because we know as more and more people do research on local languages of China for so much more mutual non-intelligibility however because of the writing system people assume it's all one language so Dan Hill do you want to talk about India? curious about how how you've got about some of these speakers if you could speak a bit to the effects of mapping or creating marginalized groups we definitely never intend to we don't map individuals any of these languages are represented in some cases really barely it's seeming to be only one person in New York that's another mapping issue I didn't mention what you do with a single person does that mean anything so no how you find people for a combination of contact and community centers most of our contacts I would say our network was kind of formed in 2010 when this article in the New York Times came out it was about language, endangered languages in New York City and it mentioned us and all of a sudden we got a lot of emails from all kinds of communities we never heard of before and really that had a snowball effect from there we got many many contacts and to some extent we've done walking streets with clear borders but more commonly through community centers through contacts we already have I mean ideally we like to work with individuals from a community who are interested in exploring their own community but there are a lot of difficult ethical questions now especially so for instance what you do with the data who has the rights to that and what happens the rights to the data whenever we record we get permission to make the data public so the goal is to make it public otherwise we could just put it locked up in some archive somewhere and it would kind of defeat the purpose so we would not we don't record unless we have permission to make it public it can be I mean if we're working with undocumented people and we make videos of them and even just last year I would think it's a negligible risk but now you spoke about some sort of like synergy and parallelism and biological diversity and as someone who's sort of speaking about a data plane people also speak about the danger of animal species as well and they obviously some of the challenges for people who would ask why are you talking about this and like the plane for people who like it it's very obvious why we like that diversity and that sort of thing could you talk about some of the challenges that you've had at your outreach with the general population about why your work is really important I would say I haven't toured the country and tried to convince people on the street that it's important mostly we end up working with people who really feel it's important who either speak these languages or are a part of a certain community so there's been less of a often I speak to a very sympathetic audience and I would actually like to speak to a very unsympathetic audience I don't know how they can do that so yeah I don't know there is maybe not so much pushback because there's less knowledge about language endangerment there's about species endangerment and of course you have corporations and pushing back against the regulations that protect species and nature so yeah there's still the first the first task is to really raise awareness before we can start arguing for it but I think it's the speakers who make the case the clearest that this is their right you know it's their identity it's their right it's something that was taken away from them in most cases so I find it hard to argue with that's why I need some some interest okay yeah I thought a point that was really interesting was that there was this population of students speaking indigenous Mexican languages who are getting mixed identified as Spanish speakers in the classroom and the severe impact that has on their matriculation and I was just wondering if you had any ideas or positive solutions about what can be done in the education from an educational systemic perspective to preserve their indigenous languages while also supporting these kind of students in the classroom yeah and the story is actually quite it's more complicated than I may have been able to indicate but first of all it was obvious that there has to be some kind of campaigns educated administrators, principals, and teachers that exist and just so they know more about these countries and their populations because in some neighborhoods in New York it's really a significant portion in the school system so that's something that has to be done and definitely I'd like to play a bigger role in that but also the issue is actually quite complicated when you look at the younger children it turns out that a lot of them actually are not fluent speakers, most of them are not fluent speakers of the indigenous language and some of them in fact are kind of in between languages between Spanish English and their indigenous language which has to do with this kind of it's a post-colonial or colonial mindset that people bring here that you shouldn't speak your mother tongue at home if it's an indigenous language so it's a dual problem on one part it's educating the educators but then also really investigating what's going on with that population of children what language are they really most comfortable in because it's actually not really the case that they're most comfortable in the indigenous language so the families also need to be told that it's okay to speak their language at home I had a video clip which I didn't have time to show but that's a big issue within those communities where you have family members fighting with each other when one of them talks to their kid for instance in their language so thanks so much for the amazing talk my question is about the also definitions and what you I think called the spectrum of death and I'm really curious about whether or not there is that moment when death is announced for a language and if that is a matter of the language kind of stopping it to evolve but also what does that mean for preservation programs or maintenance programs as you call them what are the risks I mean if I can relate it to preservation also in architecture what are the risks of preservation not allowing for a language to continue to evolve yeah there's several questions there so the language changing which has its own issues and the language just giving way to another language completely and the issue of when does the language when the language extinct is very difficult and the kind of political one as well because this term extinct language or dead language was just a commonly accepted term for a long time and then there was pushback on the part of indigenous communities that's what right do you have to say that we're extinct and that we speak a dead letter that our language is dead and gone right so even the terminology is difficult the term that came to replace that was then sleeping language and the idea was that the language could be revived because in some cases it was revived it died and then came back which is something that humans have a hard time doing but grammar and recordings and texts then you can actually do the language that happened with Hebrew of course and it happened in two MacArthur awards were given to two Native Americans recently who did the same thing with their languages through the help of the linguist and through texts and the lexicon they actually brought their language back within their small family network but they brought it back so if that's the case then maybe extinct is really fine so there's the politics of that and then the issue of language changes another question you have indigenous languages changing all the time in some cases very rapidly in some cases people try to bring back a language but it's already influenced by English or Spanish and the older generation disapproves and the younger generation says this is the best we can do and so that becomes a very contentious issue with almost all language revitalization programs I am an undergrad here at Columbia College of Human Rights and I really am looking forward to doing work in minority indigenous language preservation one day and I as an undergrad sometimes feel as a student the overwhelming sense of dread when I think about all these languages starting out and knowing that I can't do anything about it right now and I'm just wondering how you deal with that in the field the being there seeing these languages and trying to preserve them like what is your mindset when you go into this and it's good like I said here in New York City we're not really in the trenches we're not in the front lines of this fight no but it's it's an easy thing to think about but the people who are really on the front lines and the trenches of this work are the New York Art and the New York Art Center's Immersion programs and those are the people who are really doing the most effective things to keep a language a lot so in a way working here mostly in New York City it's you know you're removed from the more brutal aspects of it in a way but there's little o's be a lot that can be done I mean the languages that are safe now will be in danger I mean we're going to lose 90 up to 90% of the languages of the world and there's an endless amount of work to be done so you know I don't despair next week this speaker is coming in and I was doing a drawing mark from South Africa and her talk is going to be about really the way that language has been preserved through text through text through cell phone in the text by that it gets preserved through recording it in some way language identity, text messaging language revitalization optimistic it's going to be awesome tempered out once the question and then you should temper that one thing they did in BBC did a story on this and I was trying to give a positive side of recording these languages trying to promote them revitalize them New York City and I thought I was going to get a very positive picture and the title of the article ended up being something like New York City biggest language graveyard I'm not sure the authors but in the positive side like I mentioned there are these cases where people eventually bring back languages that were no longer spoken so with in the worst case documentation can still writer side I like to point at that question how can you support the work that your organization specifically does and also as a creative product supporting the work that we do resources of course resources are very short but actually a very small organization I don't think that came off as a big organization but we're a small organization of resources so anything that helps in terms of resources is a big help we do have volunteers over the summer especially it's tricky putting off those volunteers to good work but volunteering helps and go to our website and see other ways but anyone who has skills in crack I mean there are hours and hours of recordings that have been actually in using software thank you so much thank you