The World Capital of Endangered Languages (Published 2024)

endangered-languageslinguisticsnew-york-citylanguage-preservationdocumentation

Abstraction: NYC hosts more endangered languages than anywhere on Earth, documented by ELA

Key points:

Ross Perlin and Daniel Kaufman's Endangered Language Alliance (ELA, founded 2010) has documented 700+ languages in NYC; at least 150 are under significant threat
Queens has more languages spoken per square mile than anywhere else in the world; South Bronx alone has 10+ endangered West African languages
~150 of ~700 Seke speakers worldwide have lived in just two Brooklyn apartment buildings; Bishnupriya Manipuri (Bangladesh/India) is now also a language of Queens
Languages survive through intergenerational transmission, not sheer speaker count; Gurr-goni (Aboriginal Australian) was stable with 70 speakers for generations
Mixtec group (500,000 speakers across south-central Mexico) at risk because whole age cohorts have emigrated; 500,000 speakers "can disappear in a generation"
NYC pandemic outreach reached communities in 9 Indigenous languages; ELA-produced first dictionaries and grammars for several languages; book "Language City" (Perlin, 2024) documents the project

Connections: Endangered Language Alliance · Language Preservation · Computational Linguistics