Ross Perlin, Language City **** 1/2

The subtitle of Language City is misleading: "The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York." Perlin is co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, an organization dedicated to recording and preserving linguistic diversity, but the book is more about the lived experience of immigrants than about protecting minority languages. A person's native language is a fundamental aspect of their cultural tradition. Describing how speakers of a minority language like Seke interact with speakers of other languages like Nepali, Hindi, or English is de facto describing the interaction between cultures. Preserving one's language is little different from preserving other aspects of one's heritage. You could likely write a similar book about the world's food traditions and how they mingle in New York.

Perlin celebrates the unmatched linguistic diversity of New York City, where about 40% of residents speak a language other than English at home and individual blocks in Queens might house a preponderance of the world's speakers of an indigenous Asian language. I was most fascinated by his in-depth profiles of people navigating multilingual environments, in New York and in their home countries. They show the forces of assimilation, hybridization, and cultural entrenchment in action. 

What do we lose when a language goes extinct, or when its speakers switch to the language of a more dominant group? Is it meaningful to identify a person's mother tongue or native language when they use different languages (or registers or dialects) in different contexts? What happens when you remove a community of speakers from the village context in which the language developed? Do the pidgins and creoles used by Himalayans in New York represent a new language or a temporary expedience?

I studied linguistics because of the way language usage reveals the intricacies of human psychology; Perlin studies linguistics because of the way language usage reveals the intricacies of sociology and culture. 

The paperback edition has a lovely artwork by Ralph Fasanella on the cover.