Lost in Translation

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When thinking of endangered languages, it’s often expected that they are spoken in remote corners of the globe, in communities that are closed off from much of the rest of the world.

“You go to some distant mountain or island, and you collect stories,” the academic Ross Perlin says, detailing how these languages have been historically studied, according to the New York Times.

But the reality is that many of the world’s lost languages are being spoken in large, cosmopolitan cities. According to Perlin, there are more endangered languages spoken in and around New York City than have ever existed anywhere else.

As a result, Perlin and other linguists at the Endangered Languages Association (ELA) located in Manhattan, set out to map the almost obsolete languages that were being spoken in New York City in 2016.

Since the beginning of the project, the ELA has located speakers of more than 700 languages and pinpointed the most isolated surviving language communities.

Last week, Perlin claimed a prestigious £25,000 book prize (more than $32,000) from the British Academy for the book “Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York.”

In his book, reviewed by the New York Times, Perlin reiterated that the reason why linguistic minorities “have been overrepresented in diaspora” is because they are “hit hardest by conflict, catastrophe and privation and thus impelled to leave.”

Now, Perlin is shifting his focus to another urban jungle with a history of migration: London.

“London may well now be second only to New York in the number of endangered languages spoken,” Perlin told the Guardian.

Perlin aims to start working on a mapping project with British researchers that would locate speakers of the city’s most at-risk languages in the hope of saving them.

“It is vital to protect and understand the diversity of languages spoken in a city because of the human knowledge and culture they hold,” he added.

He believes that mapping the languages would be “very useful” for London, cautioning that the British capital is influenced by similar economic pressures that threaten language elsewhere.

“As in New York, some of the language diversity has now been pushed out by the high cost of housing, and this creates other pockets of small language groups in other parts of the country,” he explained.