 Hi everybody, and thank you for being on this Zoom slash online chat about Ross Perlin's new book, Language City. I'm Atusa Abrahamian, your moderator, and I've known Ross for quite some time and I'm so thrilled to be talking about this book because since I finished reading it, I cannot shut up about it. It's a remarkable book, just, I mean, the scales fell from my eyes. I've been living in New York City for 20 years, I speak a bunch of languages, I think of myself as a reasonably cosmopolitan person and I just had no idea that all of these very small, very endangered languages were hiding literally blocks from my house from where I used to work. It's incredible. I mean, if you read the, there's six sections, each talks about unendangered language and what you end up with is a kind of kaleidoscopic vision of New York that I think that nobody has seen before. So thank you so much, Ross, for writing this marvelous book. It's also very immersive and fun to read and the linguistic bits are not too boring, I assure you. And that's all thanks to Ross's years and years and years of field work and activism and reportage. So Ross, thanks again for being here. Can you say a few words about how this book came about? Well, thanks so much, Atusa. Thank you for doing this with me. It's really exciting to have this discussion with you. I feel like your work on the cracks in the nation-state system globally, as you put it, is kind of a really complementary with the things that I'm interested in and talking about in terms of how languages, the world's 7,000 plus languages fit into the sort of approximately 200 nation-states. There's obviously an mismatch there that I think we'll get into. But I'd also like to just quickly thank New America and everyone at New America. That's, you know, Aouista, Sarah, Narmada, in particular, who helped make this event possible. And the New America Fellowship, which I guess you're now on, right? And I was on this past year, which really gave me the space and the community to bring this book out, to finish it, and to, you know, it just came out two weeks ago. So I'm super grateful to New America for providing the platform, the space, the intellectual community, and hopefully also sort of a dimension closer to the world of policy and politics as well, because this is both a book about languages and a book about cities. So in terms of the genesis of it, it's been over a decade in the making. I, over a decade ago, was finishing up my PhD in linguistics. At the same time, I had also written this book called Internation, which was about unpaid labor and had a more political charge, very different from my linguistic work. But my primary interest through all these years had been in language endangerment and the documentation of endangered languages, linguistic diversity, and the future of, you know, the world's 7000-plus languages, of which over half really are considered endangered by most linguists in a sort of an unprecedented degree of crisis that's happening right now. And so initially, my approach to that had been to do sort of, quote unquote, traditional linguistic fieldwork in Southwest China and Eastern Himalaya, the most linguistically diverse part of China and the Southwest. This is where I became interested in these issues, got to know about them through, especially a Chinese linguist named Sun Hongkai, who was sort of a legendary figure, who I talk a little bit about in the book. So I was doing that work there, which was sort of, you know, being in a distant mountainous region, you know, given having been born and raised in New York, so 7000 miles from home and working on a dictionary and a grammar and a set of recordings for this language. Tarong spoke in one particular valley. And then I came home to New York after several years of doing that work. Endangered language lines had just been established as this kind of new organization for the first time, looking at urban linguistic diversity in this way by a group of linguists, language activists, speakers, artists, sort of understanding that cities, of course, have always been linguistically diverse and New York has a paradigm case of that in many ways, but that there had been an acceleration in that in just the last few decades with urbanization, right, the world's population now being majority urban, sort of breakneck urbanization going on everywhere. But also the arrival of speakers of indigenous endangered minority and primarily rural languages in particular, their arrival into cities, again, not just New York, as sort of a paradigm case, a gateway of immigration now going back centuries. But what had happened, especially after 1965, the Immigration Act, maybe we'll talk a little about the sort of the ups and downs of immigration, but had really sort of in some ways, even perhaps a little inadvertently opened the doors of the US and New York to an unprecedented degree of linguistic diversity that hadn't really been recognized, and that this was happening for a moment when more and more of the world's languages are in danger, that their speakers are arriving in New York, which then becomes a kind of strange last minute haven or last minute babble, where the languages are, but they're invisible largely to those or inaudible to those who are not the speakers or in the communities, let alone policymakers or the census. And so this became the work of the Endangered Language Alliance, the organization which I've co-directed for the past decade. And the book is at once a linguistic history of New York and a portrait, a linguistic portrait of a city, which is something I hadn't seen done and wanted to do to sort of paint a city in all of its languages, not just the sort of major ones that people know about. And of course, you know, there are a dozen languages in New York with over 100,000 speakers that are major. And we do talk about those part of the linguistic history, but to recognize actually that sort of the secret sauce of the city's history is in its lesser known peoples and at the lens of language really sort of gets beneath the sort of nation-state idea to let us see specifically where people are coming from and what the actual flows are. So it's that linguistic history and then it's the portraits of six speakers that we've been working with for years through the Endangered Language Alliance that I've known well and I talk about each case, their community, their story, how they're approaching this question of preserving or developing their endangered mother tongues. And then some ideas and things about the future and the policy implications and where things might go from here. So the structure is sort of past, present and future. Yeah. Something I found and I think I hope that you tell us a bit more about each person that you spent years following because it sounds like you developed some very substantial relationships with these kind of keepers of endangered languages. But I do want to go back to something you hinted at here, which is that the nation-state is not such a big, does not play such a big role in your book at all. In fact, and this, I mean this is a compliment, sometimes when you're on your fieldwork, I stopped myself and I said, wait, where, what country are we in? And then I realized the whole point is that it doesn't really matter because there's been this kind of de-territorialization and then re-territorialization of these languages in our wonderful city of New York. And I was hoping you could say a few words about the sort of topography or this kind of where people land and what it looks like because you have a whole village in an apartment building. You have little pockets of languages here and there. What is the topography of this linguistic landscape look like? Yeah, the nation-state can be a distraction here in some ways. And as I said, over 7,000 languages, which really, there's no sort of birth date to a language. Languages are the result usually of continuous processes that catch back really thousands of years. I mean, there are occasionally moments when you can say a language coalesces as a sort of named entity, but really what we're talking about are much more sort of gradual, generational developments that have happened in particular localities adapting to particular environmental niches. Really going back thousands of years as historical linguistics sort of traces these language families and language families famously are not really political entities, although sometimes they're harnessed as such, but they really cut across a different kind of history. And nation-states, of course, are mostly just a century or so old, most of the 200 or approximately 200 nation-states we have. And most of them have this kind of ideology that they have inherited, which is that they're going to promote one or just a few standard languages, and that they're going to do that with education systems and language policy and so on that really kind of constrain linguistic diversity and generally don't know what to do with the fact that in most cases they have dozens, if not hundreds of languages on their territory, which represent these much older forms of belonging and much more local types of identity that are quite complex and are again primarily oral because that's been what people have needed in most cases. So there's really a sort of a mismatch here and I really think to understand who's coming, as I say at one point, some of the oldest immigrants. Lenape is the original language of the territory and we'll talk about that. That's New York's indigenous language of the surrounding area and it's highly endangered to the point of having a single speaker, essentially a single native speaker who's now in Canada through the waves of displacement that have happened and expulsion and this is not uncommon for a Native American language, of which there were some 300 north of the Rio Grande at the time of European colonization with the vast majority today either lost or endangered and yet rebarcable revitalization work going on, including the Lenape. But from there, starting exactly 400 years ago with colonization and the settlement of the Dutch sort of establishing at first also this wasn't exactly a Dutch new Amsterdam. It was a Dutch West India company, a trading space, perhaps not unlike the ones that you describe it to say in a way, these sort of de-territorialized zones and the Dutch government sort of became involved at certain points. But really it was this kind of strange corporate entity that was then highly multilingual and some 18 languages were already spoken by the first sort of 400 people who came and most were not Dutch speakers. There were speakers of all kinds of different things, including the first permanent settlers who came 400 years ago were Waaloon speakers from what's now the French-Belgian border. But it wasn't France, it wasn't Belgium, but Waaloon speakers, people like Peter Stuyvesant, he was a Frisian speaker, they were Flemish speakers. These are all minority languages at the time and today the newest arrivals are really not best described as from China or from Guinea, but speakers of Fujianese or Fulani and those actually that gets at where people are really coming from. And that also explains what happens when people arrive here to your question about settlement patterns and that it really doesn't make sense or it's not really kind of what's going on to say, oh, this is just Chinatown or this is little Guinea or little, you know, because actually what's happening is that all kind of regions of the world are sort of seen in microcosm now in parts of especially the outer boroughs of New York. And again, it's true of other cities as well, but people are settling in particular patterns that are of course determined also by work and by the cost of housing and a bunch of other things, but also very much by sort of linguistic and cultural connections and particular sort of flows. As you mentioned, the case of Seke, one of the languages I talk about 700 speakers in the world at most coming originally from five villages of Nepal. To call them Nepali would not be quite right. They were traditionally they're right up on the border with to really now the sort of China controlled areas of Tibet and there's several distinctive languages coming from there. It was actually an independent principality for a long time within which Seke speakers in their five villages were themselves already a kind of minority. Now they've come to Brooklyn and Queens, especially Brooklyn, where there's one vertical village in particular where well over 100 of those 700 speakers have come to and are living and that's a major space for the language, really a sixth village. So those kinds of flows, which I think are much more common than we understand actually sort of make up the bedrock of the immigrant city and actually tell us much more about what nation is, the trans local, not just trans national, but really trans local connections that bind places, a particular village in Puebla and Mexico to a particular block or neighborhood in the Bronx. I think that's a lot of what's really going on in terms of, you know, the actual way that life is shaped and the power of remittances, you know, it's really about those kinds of connections that make immigration tick and make a city tick and to sort of just say, Oh, there's been a huge wave of Mexican migration to New York since the 1990s. That's brought, you know, people or whatever misses the fact, well, over three quarters of them are from a few particular states in southern Mexico. That's quite different from LA or Chicago or elsewhere. It also means that it's a heavily indigenous migration speaking well over a dozen different languages. So, you know, these are the kinds of things that I hope the book opens up. Yeah, for sure. And it you know, anyone who lives in New York has had an experience where you notice, oh, all the all the cobblers seem to be, you know, Aryan, right, or Aryan, or I was getting my hair cut a couple, I go to a place down the street where to get my hair cut and the the barbers and there's one female hairdresser are all they're like, they're from Tajikistan, right? But that doesn't mean a whole lot because they're Jews who speak Persian and Russian about as fluently as anything else. And so it's a funny it's a funny mix because even they will not say we're from Tajikistan because that's not how they identify. So yeah, language gets you into a deeper and then we're not even talking about people are often like a dialect or language actually getting yeah, getting the deeper you get into where somebody is actually on what they actually speak. And there's I think a strong over representation always of religious, linguistic, ethnic and other minorities that are motivated to migrate, in any case, and then sort of established communities elsewhere. And then the dynamics of diaspora that result from that, these sort of, it's not representative, it's not majority in communities. It's actually the sort of this question, I guess also the diet, the diasporization of everyone is also an interesting question. What does it mean for so many groups to be in diaspora and then a place like New York to be a capital of diasporas? Yeah, when I was reading your book, it occurred to me that you could have written a you could have written a sort of parallel narrative of this of this language focus book by just talking about the food and the food comes up in every almost every chapter. It made me very hungry personally. And so you also it sounds like you ate your way around New York City as much as you listened and talked your way around. The food is important. And it's a good way. It's a good way in. But there are also very serious parallels, I think, between food and language here. Yeah, culture too. So food comes up in a number of different ways. One way when related to what you were just talking about with the coppers and the barbers is this question of occupational niches, how people work, the labor markets that are based on these immigrant patterns. Because just as people are flowing from particular places to particular areas of New York and other cities, they're also finding their way into particular occupations, particular niches, whether it's barbers or cobblers. So just within the world of food service, there are so many of these kinds of niches. And again, this is so much of in understanding this sort of both the immigrant contribution to the revitalization of American cities, understanding labor markets, these might not be exactly kind of fair official labor practices. In some cases, there might be a reflection of really exploitative hierarchies depending on where people are coming from. It's obviously about sort of where people can get a foothold, what jobs they can get when there are language barriers, when they may not be documented and so on. But just within food service, I mean, an extraordinary one of these niches that I talk a little about that I think has a lot of importance is that of the deliveryistas, the delivery workers in New York who just in the last 10 years have become a sort of major force. Many are from Mexico and Guatemala. They were essential workers in the time, you know, the height of the pandemic. Many are indigenous, heavily indigenous speakers of my and languages from Guatemala, so Pisteco, and Plapaneco, and other languages from Mexico. And, you know, that fact has also then enabled a certain mobilization just as the use of Yiddish or Sicilian enabled a certain mobilization among garment workers a century ago. It's a part of the story of unions, part of the story of labor. And, you know, just within the world of food there, the delivery still is, of course, there are the famous Greek diners, but now it's it's it might be that, you know, more about the Mexican diners or more about the Albanian pizza places instead of the Italian pizza places. And these things are always kind of shifting and changing. So I would definitely recommend sort of eating your way through the book. I wish there should be a sort of like tasting notes pairing then you because it also has to do with the history of foods. Yeah, this isn't be an idea. We should do it. So there is a language map of New York that kind of should be in some ways a companion of the book. It's talked about in the book. It's something that we worked on for many years of the Endangered Language Alliance and that was part of all of the research for this. There's a both a print version which is for donation to the ELA, but also a free digital version at languagemap.nyc. And this shows the over 700 plus languages which we've documented as being in New York tell their stories. It shows the recordings and it's very kind of intimately tied to the book. And I think we should have a sort of food overlay. And you know this idea that of course the way that other places show restaurants, you know this here's a Senegalese restaurant or here's an Italian restaurant here's a Ghanaian restaurant they put it in terms of national categories. And the idea of a cuisine I compare at one point to the idea of a national language. This idea that there's some sort of standardized thing which can be sort of put to a language. Of course nations want to promote that. Some actively do promote that. For instance the Thai government has been instrumental in promoting the opening of Thai restaurants. But if you actually get under the hood of most of the dishes and most of what people are cooking what's happening. As with language there are much more sort of local articulations and recipes that are in play. At the same time as many of the ingredients have been flowing sort of globally or regionally of course. You know whether it's you know how tomatoes were tomato went from now on one of the languages I talk about in the book. You know it became an integral part of Italian cuisine to a point where we can't imagine it without it. So the ingredients may flow which is not unlike language how things do sort of pass you know pass globally. We're not talking about totally isolated languages here. But then they become very locally articulated and it's that sort of that patterning that I try to get at. And the nation state is almost this kind of I don't know awkward category in the middle that now tries to take credit for everything. Yeah yeah. So the languages many were new to me partly because they're very small and the most to me the most fascinating chapter was was was about Wahi. Can you tell me a little bit. There was an incident that was just amazing because you spend time in New York but you also do field work at just tell us about the DVD in the Tajik Tajik high lens. Is that right. Yeah. Yeah. The Pamir mountain region. Yeah. This was one of those moments where I think the kind of flows back and forth of ideas and languages and recordings. Kind of the oraboris sort of was biting its own tail. So you know in this in this section of the six speakers we've touched on a few of them. This is you know it's about a woman in Hussnia who is highly multilingual kind of a classic example of a multilingual New Yorker. You know who came from Tajikistan a little over a decade ago speaks you know nine languages at least kind of depending on how one wants to count. And you know and again this is not totally uncommon in York and in other cities where half the population speaks a language only in English at home. But then many people are speakers of three four five and four languages. You would also know different languages of course. And you know in her case she was born in this in this particular area Tajikistan actually with a lot of Kyrgyz neighbors. But then it's an area that's religiously distinct because they're Ismaili Muslims. We're distinct from there. It's kind of seen as a Ushizm but it's also totally distinct from the Sunni majority in Tajikistan. And they're in this mountainous region and they speak these distinctive languages that are technically kind of seen as Eastern Iranian languages but they're very different from Farsi from Persian right or even from Tajik which is much closer to you know to what's spoken in Tehran or Dari and Kabul. So these are these are really distinctive languages from a particular branch of this family. In you know as is often the case a mountainous region will preserve deeper diversity where every valley is still able to have kind of strong local identities that have resisted. While taking in influences have at same time kind of resisted being completely lost. So you know this is now a community that's on the move since the fall of the soviet union since the Tajik civil war where the Pamiri peoples in their you know half dozen different languages were you know often pursued in various ways. So it's one of the city's newest communities only several hundred people at this point speaking at least six different languages. Usnia speaks one of the even smallest of them, Wahi very distinctive language but she also speaks you know several of the other Pamiri languages she also speaks Kyrgyz which is more closely related to Turkish. She also each level of her life has been in a different language Tajik for school then Russian for college and work English when she came here Turkish through you know her family and their sort of diaspora. So you know as we do in a few sections of the book it kind of moves between New York and in this case Tajikistan as it says saying where you know there's certain things that of course you have to do sort of back in the home region in terms of recording people and you know it's sort of working between places and we're in this bazaar in Borog which is sometimes called the Paris of the Pamir region because it is sort of this the only real kind of city and it's just an interesting place where you know all these regional languages are kind of coming into play but it's very distinct from being in Dushanbe the Tajik capital this is almost like the capital of a small kind of area unto itself that really feels very autonomous in a lot of ways and we're in this this bazaar and we're sort of greeting people and we're just kind of mingling and run into somebody of course who's a Shugni speaker that's kind of the largest of these Pamiri languages whose daughter is in New York as part of that community and we're all chatting and she she thinks she thinks for a second and she realizes you know that we have to go talk to this bazaar DVD seller who actually had taken it turns out unwittingly like a recording of ours made in New York with this woman's daughter the Shugni speaker had sort of made its way kind of all the way back to this bazaar DVD man and he'd burned a DVD out of it as if it were part of an original you know kind of compilation and it's probably somebody in Russia who gets his sort of from that Pamiri diaspora there and so we're standing there in this bazaar in the middle of photo looking at he's playing for us our own recording that he had then kind of doctored and was was selling you know on the other various sort of DVDs. That must have been so validated right as someone doing pretty obscure work in a small organization. It was a special articulation of this sort of the boomerang effect that's been called some people called it the pizza effect or the taco effect which is kind of an interesting kind of gloss on everything we're talking about so you know with the the idea of the pizza effect when it's been called that it's the idea that actually you know nobody would deny that this is a sort of Neapolitan Neapolitan food in a lot of ways although the word actually is connected with Pide from Turkey and other things around the Mediterranean but you know pizza as we know it this is a Neapolitan word again not Italian wasn't sort of known about in Tuscany particularly it was a Neapolitan thing but it globalizes via New York it's in the large movement of of Neapolitan speakers to the US and especially New York and you know I won't get into those debates about whether it was Lombardi or the other guy or you know who made the first right coal-fired thing and New Haven we know is great too and whatever but basically you know we're talking about something which was highly local product having to do with sort of Neapolitan speakers we then through migration come to particular places in the US and New York and then pizza becomes this you know global phenomenon that's when it sort of boomerangs back this is the pizza effect to Italy so now you know after so many people going to Italy and asking for pizza seems like you can get pizza everywhere in Italy but it's not Italian or it's only recently Italian it's Neapolitan via migration to New York and then boomerang back so in a way you know that those that's it's illustrative of also how these things move yeah yeah and how technology sort of enables these languages to to kind of stay alive kind of across great distances although the technology bit of it is a little complicated how how are the tech platforms aiding or thwarting or like how are they contributing to the preservation of endangered languages the technology question is an interesting one that's obviously still unfolding in many ways and it's important not to forget that writing itself as a technology really a technology compared to to the oral dimension which I think you know oral languages is really universal or signed language in the case of deaf villages and deaf communities but basically oral or signed languages and there are also whistled languages and drummed languages but those tend to sort of build on and then those are highly endangered as well those tend to build on spoken languages so really worldwide you're talking about every community having a spoken or signed language but writing again being really a technology that emerges relatively recently in the history of language into in just a few places so technologies the question of technologies kind of goes back a while but if we're talking of course today about digital technologies and the sorts of things that are in the news and on the one hand they're certainly enabling the kind of documentation we do the kind of field work we just mentioned you know it has really bloomed partly out as a result of the awareness growing awareness in just the last few decades of language endangerment but also partly because of better technologies recording technologies video technologies portability of those things software for linguistic work and so on which itself is kind of its own interesting story involving both missionaries and academic linguists and language activists missionaries are also very involved in this stuff which is an important aspect but those have certainly enabled the work of language documentation that we do we use technology all the time at the same time you know according to one the best study of this that has been done only about five percent of the world languages are online in a meaningful sense so there is you know this this way in which if a language is not sort of commercially important enough doesn't have enough eyeballs attached to it I guess that that can be sold to the tech platforms are not really going to do much about it there's a few little initiatives here and there that we've even been kind of you know tied to at different points but ultimately you know they sometimes say oh well if you know speakers want to sort of do volunteer translation of the platform Facebook and Google have done this oh if you want to you know donate your labor as a speaker you know Wikipedia is one of the best it's obviously a pretty open platform for people but there's all sorts of things that would have to happen first even having a writing system right writing and perhaps a degree of standardization are even part of this this highly written nature of the internet up till now this is just talking about the internet and then for the sorts of like automatic translation and AI they rely on having a certain amount of data and certain amount of information to even be able to sort of do these things so so this idea that Google and Facebook are organizing the world's information and connecting the world is is pretty empty when you think about the fact that most of the world's seven thousand languages are not on there so you know many hope to get on there there's sort of a double-edged sword to it but technology you know it remains to be seen it's not a it's not a cure all by any means it may help in certain ways but that depends on how it's controlled and shaped right and and also the the speakers themselves play a big role in the influencing these platforms you mentioned an anecdote about Microsoft facing relentless lobbying from Nicole and co-speakers of an African language and finally giving in and creating sort of adopting the font on their software right so this is of the six stories this is this is the one that really gets most at this question of writing and technology exactly it's about Ibrahima who is originally from Guinea speaker of a Manding language this is a really important group of languages in across West Africa that have been divided in various ways by colonial borders and even language policies and West Africa turns out has been a hotbed of new writing systems of the last two centuries and the most successful of them arguably has been in coal invented by a guy named Sula Manicante in the 1940s and now has sort of tireless advocates like Ibrahima who are going wherever people are migrating to with New York with its large and growing West African community as one of the epicenters so you know Ibrahima for him a big part of promoting in coal has been not just sort of teaching the language and establishing it within the West African diaspora but getting it into these tech platforms and that involves Unico that involves Microsoft all of these guys so I'm going to jump in for one second and ask audience members to submit their questions I have many many more but I don't want to hug all of Ross's time so please send us questions we will try to address them and in the meantime I will I will keep at it so um Ross there's you are really gung-ho about endangered languages right you're like a fan something you're more ambivalent about in the book is this idea that endangered languages do seem to me or all language does seem to need some kind of container to survive and you know in our world this container tends to be the state the nation state um can you kind of walk us through like are there any alternatives to like a territorial state for language to survive like can we think of alternatives and what are some of the good ones that you've encountered because this is something that is like fundamental and you know we're not going to have seven thousand new states overnight um so what do we do if we do need some kind of a home base for language I've tried to spend a lot of time even just understanding what the structure has been for these languages to to evolve what kind of space they have had that has allowed them to be distinct languages because the answer is not just isolation in a valley uh it's it's it's more complicated than that I I totally agreed that there needs to be a space uh for for a language a distinctive way of speaking a distinctive you know set of sounds uh the whole kind of communicative system to evolve in and and grow in um and you know in in sociolinguistics the branch of linguistics that talks about how language functions in society um you know there's often talk about different domains of language whether languages are home whether it's used in religious space whether it's used in this workplace um what spaces it has and part of looking at language endangerment I mean it's it's not just about uh the population size because historically there have been many languages which have been even stable with 70 or 80 speakers uh and especially in sort of hunter-gatherers societies which are relatively smaller scale than a few hundred people um a language can be totally stable in terms of intergenerational transmission an intergenerational transmission is really the the sort of the key metric around language endangerment uh but this idea of spheres or domains like where can the language be used is is critical and and when there are fewer and fewer domains when it's going down to sort of just the home which is often the fundamental one uh that that really reflects greater degrees of endangerment um and so you know it's interesting to compare I mean there's a lot of ways of thinking about this one is even just to think about empires versus nation states and actually whether paradoxically empires have been better containers for linguistic diversity uh and then linguistic diversity I think is really is is what I'm passionate about here because I think it's uh um although it's been sort of uh vilified as babble you know as a place where nobody can understand each other that's not how linguistic diversity works in my experience or my research actually it what happens is a much more intricate patterning of of ways of communicating and people find ways through multilingualism and multi-perspectivalism to to to be together and interact together um so you know it's not just a sort of confusion of tongues as that kind of ill-fated little passage of genesis has it it's actually uh something much richer that results and uh you know could be compared to you know the world of biodiversity and has been often uh such that uh you know really what you will be getting now is more of a monoculture and I think a monoculture actually has serious downsides that we're not really understanding but we think it's all sort of peace and commerce but actually a monoculture a linguistic monoculture is really problematic so um you know first I think it's to understand actually empires have in certain ways and perhaps new york functions more as a kind of weird cosmopolis uh imperial cosmopolis uh I'm really interested to hear what you think about this you know that this idea of uh you know the sort of and this is not to sort of uh lionize empires which have had so many of their problems but whether new york is actually sort of a success or more to sort of Habsburg Vienna uh or Ottoman Istanbul uh or some of these other places that have been more sort of like cosmopolitan entrepods rather than you know new york is not the sort of national capital of a nation state exactly and the united states is not entirely like a nation state which perhaps has good and good sides and bad sides right uh but then so that's that's one discussion but then I think on a much more local level it's about locality and the strength of localities and their particular local environments can continue to have a sufficient degree of autonomy and strength and ability to sort of self uh you know self-regulate and develop their own kind of cultural linguistic futures and I think that's possible without or within the nation state there are some nation states that are trying to allow for this in certain ways we could talk about comparative language policy across different places uh but what has to be really resisted I think is the sort of uh monocultural nation state especially yeah um we have a really interesting question from cam kidia which I'm gonna preface with a little anecdote so I have two little kids and before they were born I was thinking what what language am I going to speak to them in because I grew up speaking Armenian and Russian and I lost the Armenian and now my Russian is like gotten to the point where it's basically Yiddish because it's so bastardized by other languages and so I thought well if I speak to my kids that's a good point that's a good point Jewish they're going to speak some kind of Yiddish that nobody understands it's very weird so we settled on French fine it's going really well um but but to cam's question how much and how well do you have to speak another language to be able to ethically put it in this course and what are the moral arguments for or against doing so in English wow thank you cam yeah it's uh well every language community kind of seems to think about these things a little bit different and that also kind of inheres in the particular histories of those language communities uh you know there are certainly some for which speaking I mean speaking speaking a language is there there are differences here between sort of languages of wider communication that have been learned and are spoken by large numbers of people as a second or third language versus versus with many of the languages that that we're talking about or that we're researching and involved in um you know it really reflects the time spent in a community it really reflect reflect an identity there is almost nobody who speaks that language who is not clearly a member of that community uh and that doesn't mean it's a totally closed circuit but uh you know in many places many parts of the world you know languages is an index of time spent with people again the book it's about it's about belonging in a place you wouldn't know it you you can't know it from books you can't learn it as a polyglot online through Duolingo you learn it because you've had some serious and deep connection with a community in a place for a long time and that's what's that's what's involved in it uh and so I think it's important not to treat languages just as codes or to think that AI is just going to sort of know these languages uh you know with with larger languages in some cases that have already kind of been through a kind of uh massification process where they're they are you know just kind of out there for people to sort of pick up as almost a kind of currency uh it can be it can be a little different but um you know there are also different very different forms of speaker hood uh which should be talked about and even the question of native speaker is that that even that category is not a straightforward one that that that is beyond all question and increasingly because of language shift and language endangerment there there is there are many people who are essentially you know savvy speakers heritage speakers rememberers um and there is a whole world now of kind of post vernacular usage symbolic linguistic usage which uh can be very meaningful for people and uh is an aspect of language revitalization that we talk about I talk about in the book uh you know with with lanape and other situations where actually there's you know a shrinking pool of if any sort of people who really learned languages languages as children and now kind of a large world of people who know some or want to knowledge it or want to use it for prayer or ritual or the things so you know I guess I would encourage uh encourage people to look whether it's at their sort of linguistic background or connections or the communities to which they're connected or want to be connected uh at the sort of different levels of speakerhood that they could sort of attune themselves to and then to sort of honestly reflect themselves in uh and certainly not to kind of hold up uh some some sort of horizon of absolute fluency or nativity which is often unrealistic or it's not even part of uh you know what speaker necessarily has to mean in different in different communities uh so I don't know exactly in terms of English I'm not sure exactly what that uh but I think English would be the same as as with as with anything and English has become a language where you know the majority of people and speakers users are are would not necessarily have spoken or used it as um you know as children and actually we need to be much more sort of open to this maybe something with the next project for me but to the world of English as English is really not a single entity and then it sort of needs to be broken up uh but that's that's another conversation yeah um I had a question about a particular use of English so in Singapore there's something known as Singlish and it's like very organic and it sort of came about uh just with people living and talking and doing things but the government really doesn't like it and for a long time they were trying to crack down and try to have people speak the Queen's English um failed absolutely failed people speak Singlish all the time and it's it's just really interesting how these two forces are you know working against each other even in like a pretty authoritarian setting right the state has tried so many times and they cannot get rid of Singlish um so Singapore is a fascinating one yeah um we have a couple of questions about um kids and education so uh Anonymous asks um says many children of immigrants and folks not from mainland US were not taught their parents mother tongue in the 90s and early 2000s are we broadly seeing a change and related question um from Leslie Villegas did you do you have a sense of how the education system in New York approaches the educational needs of school-aged children in these linguistically diverse communities and I think that's something we're seeing play out every day with with so many new arrivals um from south of the border as well as well as other countries yeah there's so much there's so much to these questions um it's you know on the one hand the benefits of bilingual education I have have only really been kind of recognized and are still only kind of being recognized just in the last few decades on a wider scale with enough evidence there there was a a mentality even until relatively recently that you know that you people's kids needed to be sort of pushed into English or the other majority language as quickly as possible that the other language would somehow negatively affect them and now it's seen that there are many educational and cognitive and other benefits to by or multi-lingualism to the point where it's actually of course become even fashionable uh and there is something of a so-called bilingual revolution in the schools which for which New York is a kind of ground zero and I talk about a little bit in the book there are uh bilingual education programs of one kind or another in 13 different languages now of course largest number in Spanish the French government has gotten very involved in promoting these especially in New York where there's also kind of friendly legislation towards it but there are also programs in Haitian Creole and in you know Polish and then Urdu and so on uh and so it's actually quite an exciting moment there was until the 1960s when especially kind of Chinese activists on the west coast the activists of New York sort of began to to bolster bilingual education and demand bilingual education uh there was really nothing of the kind uh at a formal level of course there were all kinds of sort of Sunday schools or other things that communities tried to do but it's an exciting moment but at the same time implementation and what it actually means uh and and having it not just be sort of transitional uh but sort of additive not subtractive uh and this is supposed to be the idea of dual language education balanced that both of these things are there and this is happening in other places too i mean you know the Hawaiian language revitalization movement which is an extraordinary one has been very much education centered the irish language school was in ireland our major vector for bolstering irish so education you know now that we depend so much on the state with mandatory public education has kind of our mandatory education has has uh has really uh made this happen you know we look to the schools language activists increasingly look to the schools to to be involved in these things because you know sort of traditional ways of education have been have already been sort of swept away so it in many ways does depend on schools but then schools they need teachers they have you know who will speak the languages they need textbooks and they have their sort of standards and political things that are pulling at them so you know how these things are actually playing out and whether it really make us a more sort of deeply multilingual country where it's sustained and we don't go through that sort of three generation immigrant pattern which sometimes even speeds up now and it's you know where language loss proceeds basically just within a few generations and few communities are able to hold on to their language that has been the norm and that's the sense in which i describe new york and other cities as like sieves that the languages are running through they're coming here they these are abilities knowledge they're just sort of being lost and there's the idea that they'll be sort of replenished somehow by new immigration but we can't count on that the homelands and the homelands themselves there's more language endangerment but i think even now just recently trump has started to i don't know whether he got a copy of language city or or not but he has been talking just in the last week or so about so-called truly foreign languages languages coming into our country and then he referred specifically most recently to languages in new york city schools that nobody knows nobody speaks nobody teaches and i assume he's referring to the kind of deep linguistic diversity that i talk about in the book and uh you know it's an interesting new kind of line for for him he's actually quite quite right that we don't have the capacity we should for interpretation and teaching of many of the languages that are coming including in the so-called migrant crisis that's been unfolding in new york just from the last couple years and and that you know languages indigenous languages of the americas in particular african languages uh you know and others are continuing to come in large numbers and we're not really prepared for it in various ways but it is an extraordinary opportunity uh so you know it's a great challenge for the schools absolutely uh and nobody denies the importance of english as a lingua franca and then spanish, Bengali, russian and so on as lingua franca is also there in in in in those communities in in certain neighborhoods but uh but we really have not quite found a way to sort of knit together a linguistic ecology that actually sort of builds on and takes advantage of and does justice to all the linguistic diversity that people are bringing and the education system has to be a big part of that yeah well your comments about trump who is definitely reading language city we wonder if if barron trump knows slovenian right it wouldn't be out of the it wouldn't be inconceivable um for his mother who spoke scottish gaelic grown up apparently she's i think from the outer heberti is a pretty obscure area but uh but i guess lost it in new york yeah yeah um but he's reeling from the sense of loss uh about that right right um anonymous has a question about the unique nature of languages spoken in new york for generations how do you approach translation slash interpretation within new york specific dialect i i'm not sure if this question is talking about like new yorkies kind of patois mixes or or something else but maybe maybe you can give it a i think there are a few things to kind of mention there certainly you know this idea of new york city english which is really a its own fascinating question and is really seen as a bundle of ethnolects uh is interesting unto itself i mean it's an example of a highly stigmatized variety of english which itself is perhaps endangered and most carried on some cases by immigrants um and of course i i also meant to mention within all of this the sort of changes in thinking about assimilation what assimilation is an older sort of straight line theories of assimilation whether that needs to be the model or what the other models of uh of immigration and arrival here are but um and the degree of diversity of communities that can exist within this polity but uh you know there are mixed languages in a sense which have also are arising in new york and i talk about some of them in the book uh you know the the best known that has been kind of put under a label of course is spanglish uh but there are which looks very different what that means in california versus new york in new york it often is this kind of new yorkan variety which combines rican or dominican spanish with local forms of english african-american english all kinds of things going on um similarly in the himalayan community i talk about this this new kind of mixed language called ravalook and and it doesn't quite make sense to call it like a thing so much as to sort of identify the the types of what's been called trans languaging the uh the types of kind of not just code switching but sort of mixing and sort of transit that's happening within between languages and it's true that these are really very little is known about them they're highly dynamic it's not clear to what extent they will be sort of passed on some have talked about runglish in bright beach sort of how russian and english kind of uh mixed together uh and ophelia garcia is a scholar in york who has done a lot of her work especially in the education system about trying to find ways that that bilingual and multi-lingual education can honor these forms of mixing but perhaps again another just last piece to kind of bring to to that question also is about you know what languages are being maintained in new york and this is part of why the story of hiddish is is is in the book because in some ways it's it's not an endangered language actually and it's one of the larger ones among the six that i talk about but um you know what's what's what's part of what's intriguing here is that uh the language is being kind of revitalized and reborn in in Hasidic brooklyn and the Hasidic community in particular has forged almost a kind of new or distinctive variety of Yiddish uh while while other forms are have been endangered or lost really you know beginning with the holocaust and then a sort of a massive loss of Yiddish speakers worldwide uh as the Hasidic global Hasidic community has been reborn with brooklyn as its kind of base um it's actually sort of bringing that language into the fourth of fifth generation partly through a system of yishivas which are separate from the public school system and other institutions so i also wanted to document that and other communities likewise you know have actually found new york to be sort of their last the last bastion for their for their language and you know it's again not clear that the public education system can necessarily provide too much space for those efforts but it's extraordinary nonetheless and it's it's it's part of the book and the story about actually new york need not be or cities need not be sort of graveyards for languages but that can actually be greenhouses in some sense yeah um so we have less than 10 minutes left um i have a quick quicky from anonymous have you thought of offering york city language tours through ala we have run some tours uh combining language and food uh himalayan queens jewish languages in brooklyn uh languages of the storia which are eastern metatranny in north africa and so on uh i teach linguistics at columbia as well i take my students usually of course i've been teaching for a number of years it's called endangered languages in global city we usually get out into the streets and go around with speakers and and eat and and so on so um uh yeah it's uh it's something that that we do occasionally it's you know to do it well we're not finding it to be a great major kind of commercial venture more of something that is just a lot of fun to get out there sometimes and and the language map is also kind of designed for people to be able to see their own location and to sort of take themselves around the city and walk around jackson heights or anywhere it's really not just queens but queens of course in some ways the epicenter and has become justly famous for being you know the most linguistically diverse part of most linguistically diverse city in the history of the world and so you know tourism is a double-edged sword obviously and uh you know what that what that looks like but i do think this is one of the sort of um one of the most kind of distinctive and important aspects of of new york and again indeed of other cities to london los angeles chicago but also johannes berg port moresby uh many others uh that whatever you know hopefully there will be ways for people to sort of appreciate here to bring it within earshot in ways that will then make them sort of advocates or more appreciative in ways that will hopefully shape policy and that will also kind of give more space for these languages so i do hope that people will sort of read the book and then you know we may have the occasional tour to look out for our events but uh but also sort of walk around the city do a language as well between the map and the book and sort of hopefully here and see the city in a different way but it goes beyond the signage and you know again the restaurants have these sort of national labels get to talk to people and get a sort of dig under through the lens of language yeah and this last question and your answer um reminded me of a really good point you make in the book which is that global quote unquote global cities love to brag about how you can get the best Thai food and you can you know see Chinese dance and what have you but it works both ways like cities have to enable and invest and sort of foster these communities um as well as just using them as a as a marketing you know line yeah i've started to see it i i saw street easy advertising on the subway saying you know live in queens among all the languages and i've seen some nascent efforts to kind of encourage tourists to new york to go to queens and to go to multilingual areas and it's not good but there's you know it's not just a sort of asset to be taking advantage of it's people's actual languages and lives so how do we kind of square that circle and we didn't talk about immigration at all and we could talk about it for another hour but um something that also struck me looking at these networks that bring speakers of these languages to new york is um you know it's so vulnerable um to immigration policy to whatever's going on at the border and uh you know we have special visas for religious workers for example but not for speakers of of um endangered languages and that's also a form of culture and and really important to people so anyway maybe that's something for elate to intriguing that's an excellent intriguing yeah yeah i mean we think about all the types of skills i mean the knowledge that it's not just the languages it's the music it's the poetry it's the wisdom and the knowledge that people are bringing as well and i guess you know one way that i you have to if you haven't already read the the cosmopolites uh it's first book and then the next book is coming out uh just in october i'm really excited about it there's a sort of there's such an interesting kind of i think contrast and and comparison to be made here about the sort of unequal mobilities who can move where how today and you know it just has traced how elites are able to now move around the world get citizenships from everywhere um while the future of immigration here uh and and new york as the place which has had this now most continually probably of any place in the world for now four centuries uh that future hangs in the balance with this with this election now on the hundredth anniversary of the 1924 immigration act closed america's borders for four decades and yours sort of choked off the city in various ways so we stand in a really precarious moment of what i talk about at the end might you know end up being peak diversity for various reasons that both the languages themselves people who speak who speak them ultimately city in the way it functions and cities more generally um you know we don't know what the future holds but it's a it's a moment i was i felt impelled to sort of do this now to to capture this moment because it's uh as much as we're now trying to be involved you know we don't know what will happen next yeah so what you can do is you can buy ross's book you can support el a vote in the fall and um open your ears because that's kind of the first step to realizing the amazing city that's around the those of us who are in new york um thanks everyone for being here thank you ross for writing this book for answering all of our questions and um yeah see you all see you all next time