The city of 700 languages

Seke is an endangered language originally spoken in five villages of northern Nepal, but its future may depend on a handful of vertical villages: apartment buildings in the middle of Brooklyn, New York.  

How did a little-documented, oral-only language used by no more than 700 people in the high Himalaya come to the concrete jungle? Rasmina Gurung, in her 20s one of Seke’s youngest speakers, learned the language from her grandmother in the village but soon moved to the country’s capital, Kathmandu, and eventually New York—where she estimates at least a quarter of her people have ended up. Here they join speakers of dozens of other endangered languages from across the Himalaya, all forming new communities while getting by in an ever evolving mix of Nepali, Tibetan, English, and their own embattled mother tongues. 

But 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. Though largely invisible (and inaudible) to outsiders, the city’s languages are from all over. Many immigrants have arrived in just the past few decades from linguistic hot spots such as the Himalaya, West Africa, insular Southeast Asia, and heavily Indigenous zones of Latin America. Today, however, many of the forces that brought people together are beginning to pull them apart.

(More than 300 languages are spoken along this NYC street.)  

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 is what drives the work of the Endangered Language Alliance, the organization I co-direct, which has started to map this landscape.

At stake is an unprecedented set of cultural, scientific, educational, and even economic possibilities. Never before have linguists and speakers been so well positioned to document languages for which few if any records exist while also pushing for their maintenance and revitalization. Just as exceptional are the artistic, musical, and culinary possibilities, as worldviews from around the globe come together and share space. 

(The Māori saved their language from extinction. Here’s how.)

Irwin Sanchez, a chef and poet in Queens who speaks Nahuatl, once the language of the Aztec, makes tacos, moles, and tamales with the words’ original meanings in mind. Husniya Khujamyorova, a speaker of Wakhi from Tajikistan, creates some of the very first children’s books for speakers of six Pamiri languages—all now represented along Brooklyn’s own Silk Road. Ibrahima Traore, who made it from Guinea to the Lower East Side, teaches N’ko, a pioneering West African writing system, and pushes for its use in every new technology. Boris Sandler, a Yiddish-speaking writer born in Moldova, contributes in his own way, novel after novel, to the miraculous rebirth of Yiddish in New York.  

Lenape, the original language of the land the city is built on, is also being revived against all the odds. From its last stronghold in rural Ontario, where there is just a single native speaker, a new generation of activists is bringing the language to a wider audience. One of them was Karen Mosko, who before she passed away would come down once a month to teach the language in Manhattan—“the place where we get bows” in Lenape.   

And then there’s Rasmina Gurung, the young Seke speaker. For seven years she has been documenting the language in both Nepal and New York with dozens of hours of recordings, many transcribed and translated, as well as a growing dictionary. But now elders are passing away and taking the language with them. Questions about immigration and asylum hang over the community’s future. Housing is increasingly challenging, and their village-like cohesion may not last. 

(How do you save a language from extinction? With creative thinking—and some help from Wikipedia.)

Over the past decades, by chance, Gurung’s Brooklyn neighborhood has become a place where people from around the world establish hometown associations, religious institutions, restaurants, and a range of other businesses and spaces—forming radically different worlds that now dwell side by side. Just minutes from the Seke vertical village you can hear Ghanaian churchgoers speaking Twi, Azerbaijani barbers speaking Juhuri, and Uber drivers gathering over kebabs and whiskey and chatting in Uzbek. Auto body shops, informal commuter or “dollar” vans, mosques, and bars ring with the sounds of African, Asian, European, Caribbean, and Latin American languages.

For all the unrealized potential, Babel—not the biblical myth but the contemporary reality—has been working in cities like New York to an extraordinary degree. Now is the moment to understand, appreciate, and defend it.

(Hawaii’s Native language nearly vanished—this is the fight to bring it back.)