The problem with trying to resuscitate dying languages

Books about endangered languages tend to be laments, full of shocking statistics and portraits of impossibly frail, ancient last speakers in faraway places. Ross Perlin’s exuberant, radical book blasts that away, exploring, instead, New York, now ‘the most linguistically diverse city in the history of the world’, home to more than 700 languages (of approximately 7,000 on the planet), and a ‘last improbable refuge’ for many speakers of ‘embattled and endangered’ tongues. ‘Far from being confined to remote islands, towering mountains or impenetrable jungles, they are now right next door.’ So one block of flats in Brooklyn is a ‘vertical village’, home to 100 of the world’s 700 speakers of Seke, a language of Nepal. The Lower East Side hosts the only synagogue where Judeo-Greek is spoken; the Jews who once spoke it in Greece were all sent to Auschwitz in 1944 – languages do not die of natural causes.

Perlin writes fiercely and finely about genocide, forced migration, forced education, suppression and racism; but these pages also thrum with action and hope. As the co-director of the tiny non-profit Endangered Language Alliance (ELA), he aims ‘to make Babel work’. He crisscrosses New York to support people reclaiming, revitalising, talking and teaching languages which are often not recognised by governments, used in business, taught in schools, held by libraries, and sometimes don’t have recordings, dictionaries or grammars.

Here, he focuses on six. Rasmina, the Seke speaker, gives him a sense of what we might lose if we let these languages die. In Seke, bale means arm-hand, while yaa means leg-foot, a different way of understanding our limbs. Husniya wants to write children’s books in Wakhi, a Pamiri language spoken in the high mountain region where Tajikistan, Pakistan, Afghanistan and China meet, which makes her ‘a minority within a minority within a minority’.