Ross Perlin: Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York

Room: History, Biography, Religion, 2nd Floor

Contemporary New York is the most linguistically diverse city in the world—and in the history of the world. What does that mean, and how did it get that way? Ross Perlin, author of the new Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York, describes the race to document and support little-known languages, following six remarkable yet ordinary speakers of endangered languages deep into their communities, from the streets of Brooklyn and Queens to villages on the other side of the world, to learn how they are maintaining and reviving their languages against the odds. He explores the languages themselves, from rare sounds to sentence-long words to bits of grammar that encode entirely different worldviews.

Ross Perlin is a linguist, writer, and translator focused on exploring and supporting linguistic diversity. His book Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York is out this year from Grove. Since 2013 he has been Co-Director of the Endangered Language Alliance, managing research projects on mapmaking, documentation, policy, and public programming for urban linguistic diversity. He also teaches linguistics at Columbia. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Harper’s, and elsewhere, and his first book Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy ignited a national conversation about unpaid work.