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In New York City, one of the most linguistically diverse places on earth, Ross Perlin is working to keep the world’s disappearing tongues alive. As co-director of the nonprofit Endangered Language Alliance, he and his team help document and preserve endangered languages spoken across the city’s five boroughs.
On any given day, an estimated 700 to 800 languages and dialects could be heard in the city — from major global tongues to rare Indigenous and minority languages with only a handful of speakers left.
New York City has always been at the forefront of language diversity, since Dutch settlers arrived in the former New Amsterdam over 400 years ago. “Some of the other colonies were essentially English-only spaces,” Perlin noted. In contrast, New Amsterdam wasn’t a British colony; it was a Dutch trading colony that attracted people from all over the world.
At the time, over 18 languages were spoken in the city, including Lenape, the language of the indigenous people who lived in the area. Unfortunately, pressure from European settlers displaced the Lenape people, forcing them into a westward diaspora across the United States. As a result, the language began to decline and faced extinction.
Perlin had the opportunity to interview Karen Mosko, a key figure among the Lenape people who was instrumental in reviving their language. Mosko, a woman in her 80s living in Canada, has since passed away. The Endangered Language Alliance played a crucial role in helping her bring the Lenape language back to Manhattan by hosting classes to teach others the language.
He has also documented a chef in New York who cooks “with the etymologies of the Nahuatl language in mind.” Nahuatl is the largest indigenous language in Mexico, the tongue of the Aztecs. Or a young woman who is likely the youngest speaker of Seke, one of the world’s rarest languages spoken across five villages in the Himalaya and Nepal, and lives in a “vertical village” in Brooklyn. In this apartment building, around 50 residents have spoken Seke at any given time. Perlin’s last book, Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York, is the ultimate key source for all these stories.
Perlin himself is a descendant of Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants and a fourth-generation New Yorker. A lecturer in linguistics at Columbia University, Perlin edited the Languages of New York City Map created by the Mapping Linguistic Diversity team, with core support from the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies and the Endangered Language Alliance. It is a free, interactive digital map that showcases the city’s astonishing language diversity, based on more than a decade of research and information from communities, speakers, and other sources.
In the vibrant borough of Queens, not far from Roosevelt Avenue, you might listen to a Mazahua speaker from central Mexico performing a deer dance popular among several Indigenous peoples of northern Mexico, or read that there are some 700 Khalka Mongolian speakers in New York, primarily in this section of Jackson Heights, but also in Sunnyside and Woodside. Gatherings are held around the city with speakers of other Mongolic languages, including Southern Mongolian, Buryat, and Kalmyk, as well as speakers of Tuvan and Hazara. Also, Spanish, Bengali, Punjabi, Mixtec, Seke, and Kuranko are among the languages spoken around this one Avenue.
Perlin has managed various projects focused on documenting languages, creating language policies, and organizing public programming to support urban linguistic diversity for endangered languages in New York City and beyond.
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On a recent Sunday, about 40 people gathered in a small shopping village in Echo Park, Los Angeles, to hear Perlin discuss the state of language preservation in the U.S. Los Angeles, alongside New York, is a hub of linguistic diversity, presumably home to hundreds of languages and dialects from around the world.
“Today, the large-scale loss of languages is something unprecedented,” Perlin lamented. There are many reasons for this loss: globalization, capitalism, and urbanization. The pull of “killer languages” — languages so dominant they can lead to the extinction of smaller ones — is also a significant factor. Even more so, only a small fraction of languages spoken in the world exist on the internet.
The talk in Los Angeles was hosted by Alan Niku, a linguist, researcher, and filmmaker whose work involves preserving languages from Iran and Kurdistan. He talked about a recent personal project: translating Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham into Jewish Neo-Aramaic for a friend’s birthday party, where he performed it in front of an audience that didn’t understand the language. “It’s functionally a useless thing to do, but it means that there is now new stuff in this language,” Niku said.
Projects like this give Perlin hope. Cultural experiments are part of what he calls a “golden age of revitalization” now, giving rise to new words and meanings.
“It’s unprecedented to do Dr. Seuss in Jewish Neo-Aramaic. These are new experiments that haven’t happened yet and that haven’t happened before, and new ways of appreciating what human language is, what human culture is,” Perlin said.
It’s the sort of work that exists alongside efforts to incorporate new languages into technology. Only a small number of the more than 7,000 languages spoken worldwide are understood by the technologies we use every day, like word processing documents or social media platforms. Voice messaging, Perlin said, is one tool that has allowed people to “leap frog” over the constraints of modern technology.
It’s also a pertinent example of how capitalism drives out languages; when there isn’t an incentive to add less-spoken languages to a platform, most of the world’s languages — up to 95% — get left out.
But don’t get it twisted: writing itself is a newer technology, far newer than spoken language, that can restrict the preservation of languages. By forcing speakers to conform to a written standard, dialects can be stunted. We’ve seen dialects and languages disappear before. During World Wars I and II, people who spoke languages like Japanese and Italian didn’t want to be heard speaking in those tongues for fear of persecution.
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“The number of pressures now on migration, among many other things, also represents a real threat to linguistic diversity in this country, combined with the other policies of the administration,” Perlin told The Urban Activist. Perlin guesses that the impact of policies we’re seeing take effect now will limit how much languages are spoken in the future. “Kids growing up right now, or just feeling this atmosphere of intolerance, will not want to speak their languages,” he said.
In March 2025, the White House issued an Executive Order declaring that the official language of the United States is English, wiping out resources for English language learners in the process. “A nationally designated language is at the core of a unified and cohesive society,” the order reads.
But saying it doesn’t make it so. According to Ross Perlin, the United States currently has the most diverse language landscape in the world. “It’s a pivotal moment,” Perlin told The Urban Activist, referring to this tension between migration being a driver of linguistic diversity in the U.S. and the White House’s new immigration policies aimed at reducing it. It is migration that has made cities like New York and Los Angeles more linguistically diverse than ever. These cities reflect a global trend towards urbanization. Almost two-thirds of humanity will live in cities by 2050, according to the United Nations, and those cities could keep all those different languages alive.
“You can’t understand New York or LA without looking at languages that most people probably have not thought about or maybe even heard of,” said Perlin.
Perlin brought up an oft-cited Yiddish quote about language: “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.” Thinking of language as representing nation-states misses the point and may not be realistic. When there are thousands of languages for roughly 200 nation-states in the world, how can language be a gun? Languages are ancient, older than the maps we have today.
At the heart of Perlin’s work is an appreciation of the human spirit to capture and document culture. Languages spoken around the world, including those smaller, minority, and Indigenous endangered ones, have found homes thousands of miles away from where they were born. And many of these homes are in New York.
