One could say the city has its own *unofficial* language, what with all the slang words and phrases we use that would likely not be understood by visitors or in other cities. But being NYC is the most culturally diverse city on the planet, we can’t even understand some of the conversations we pick up on when walking down the sidewalk, and that’s because a whopping 700 languages are spoken here.
Ross Perlin, a lecturer in Columbia’s Department of Slavic Languages and co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, wrote for National Geographic:
New York City—the most linguistically diverse city in the history of the world—may be hitting peak diversity. Its 700-plus languages represent over 10 percent of the global total.
But how did NYC become such a linguistically diverse city? Perlin notes how though NYC originally spoke the indigenous language Lenape–which is where the name Manhattan comes from–the city eventually evolved and the languages of Native Americans, enslaved Africans, and European refugees and traders were all added to the mix.
Perlin adds that while the first 400-500 inhabitants of NYC reportedly spoke 18 different languages, the immigration waves of the 19th and 20th centuries turned NYC into a global center of business, politics, and culture, introducing even more languages.
Though largely inaudible to outsiders, the languages spoken in NYC come from all over–Seke, an endangered language originally spoken in five villages of northern Nepal, is spoken in the middle of Brooklyn. Spanish, Bengali, Punjabi, Mixtec, and Kuranko are among the hundreds of languages spoken on Queens’ Roosevelt Avenue alone. And the Himalaya, West Africa, Southeast Asia, and heavily Indigenous zones of Latin America are just some of the places where many immigrants currently living in NYC hail from.
The issue: “half of all 7,000-plus human languages may disappear over the next century, and—because many have never been recorded—when they’re gone, it will be forever,” writes Columbia News. And NYC unfortunately isn’t immune to this sad statistic. Lenape, for example, has just one native speaker due to centuries of colonization and displacement.
Thankfully, some are taking steps to preserve these endangered languages. A small band of revivalists, for example, is trying to save Lenape. While Perlin is moving as fast as possible to map the little-known languages across NYC.
Back in January of 2023, Anchorage, Babel in Reverse, an installation in DUMBO, also worked to unite NYers through the power of language. As visitors passed by, speakers played a babel of recorded voices speaking hundreds of different languages–all of which are spoken in NYC–though when one walked beneath each speaker the babel faded and individual voices and languages could be heard reciting stories, poems, and fables.
The installation featured hundreds of different voices, including a number of voices speaking endangered languages that NYC is sadly expected to lose within the next generation or two. Perlin writes:
Given accelerating language loss even in the languages’ homelands, threats to immigration, and the rising costs of city life, time may be running out…The remarkable linguistic convergence in New York and similar cities could vanish fast, before there has even been time to document or support it.
This urgency drives the work of the Endangered Language Alliance, an organization Perlin co-directs, which has started to map the language landscape. Thankfully, Perlin notes that linguists and speakers have never before been so well positioned to document languages and work towards their maintenance and revitalization.