Language City The Fight To Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues In New York 1st Edition Ross Perlin by Ross Perlin 9780802162472, 0802162479 instant download after payment.

From the co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, a captivating portrait of contemporary New York City through 6 speakers of little-known & overlooked languages, diving into the incredible history of the most linguistically diverse place ever to have existed on the planet

Half of all 7,000-plus human languages may disappear over the next century &—because many have never been recorded—when they're gone, it will be forever. Ross Perlin, a linguist & co-director of the Manhattan-based non-profit Endangered Language Alliance, is racing against time to map little-known languages across the most linguistically diverse city in history: contemporary New York. In Language City, Perlin recounts the unique history of immigration that shaped the city, & follows 6 remarkable yet ordinary speakers of endangered languages deep into their communities to learn how they are maintaining & reviving their languages against overwhelming odds. Perlin also dives deep into their languages, taking us on a fascinating tour of unusual grammars, rare sounds, & powerful cultural histories from all around the world.

Seke is spoken by 700 people from five ancestral villages in Nepal, a hundred of whom have lived in a single Brooklyn apartment building. N’ko is a radical new West African writing system now going global in Harlem & the Bronx. After centuries of colonization & displacement, Lenape, the city’s original Indigenous language & the source of the name Manhattan (“the place where we get bows”), has just one fluent native speaker, bolstered by a small band of revivalists. Also profiled in the book are speakers of the Indigenous Mexican language Nahuatl, the Central Asian minority language Wakhi, & the former lingua franca of the Lower East Side, Yiddish.

A century after the anti-immigration Johnson-Reed Act closed America’s doors for decades & on the 400th anniversary of New York’s colonial founding, Perlin raises the alarm about growing poli