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Dazzling Map Shows NYC's Incredible Linguistic Diversity
By
Christopher Robbins
Published Dec 3, 2019
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By
Christopher Robbins
Published Dec 3, 2019
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Seke is a language spoken in just a handful of towns in Nepal—worldwide, there are fewer than 700 people who speak it. More than 100 of those people live in Brooklyn and Queens, according to the Endangered Language Alliance, a group that seeks to document and preserve smaller, minority, and Indigenous languages across New York City. Seke is one of 637 languages and dialects the ELA has mapped in roughly 1,000 locations across the five boroughs and New Jersey—more than three times the number represented in the census.
"Over 10 years ELA has built a network of linguists, community leaders, language activists, speakers, students, and just regular New Yorkers who either speak these languages or know people who do — so every point on the map was based on a conversation with someone knowledgeable about a community," said Ross Perlin, ELA's co-director.
The map (currently a zoomable PDF) displays where there are languages spoken by large swaths of the neighborhood, and those that are spoken by just a few people. Around 40 percent of the languages represented are from Asia, 27 percent are from Africa, 18 percent from Europe, 14 percent from the Americas, and the remainder come from Oceania and the Pacific.
Perlin said that the map is a "first step" in helping to preserve endangered dialects and languages.
"What we do, and what linguists can do often is help document a language—recording and describing and analyzing languages primary oral, that have really almost no research on them, or no recording, or learning materials, media, all these things we take for granted as speakers of larger languages." That work then leads to connecting speakers of these languages and dialects; ELA also hosts language classes in rare dialects.
The group is working on creating a fully interactive map, but a $40 donation gets you a full scale color language map of New York.
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Christopher Robbins
Christopher Robbins is a New York City reporter covering transportation, affordable housing, local politics, and criminal justice. His work has also appeared in New York Magazine, The Village Voice and The New York Times. Chris is a graduate of Patrick Henry High School in Roanoke, Virginia, and enjoys biking to Fort Tilden in the summertime.
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