New York – Many know that you can live in New York without speaking a word of English. You only need to barely know Spanish. The police messages are in two languages and Spanish appears everywhere, in the notices on the subway, in municipal ones and even in advertisements, in cinema posters, in bookstores. Then there are the free newspapers in Chinese. And those in Korean. And in Arabic. And the kiosks where Bengali is used. Or the shops around Word Trade Center where being from Abruzzo helps. Or the Sicilian on Long Island.
In New York at least seven hundred languages and dialects are spoken, of which 38 percent originate from Asia, 24 come from Africa, 19 from Europe and 16 from the Americas and the rest from Oceania and the Pacific. One hundred and fifty are at risk of extinction. The data emerge from research conducted by two linguists, Ross Perlin and Daniel Kaufman, who founded Ela in 2010 in Manhattan, an acronym that stands for Endangered Language Alliance, a non-profit that works to safeguard endangered languages.
The association has put together all the data to create an interactive map which Timeout magazine talked about for the first time two years ago and which has now been proposed and expanded by the New York Times, based on a graphic design by Francesco Muzzi, followed by journalist Alex Carp and posted online last week. In case there was any doubt, New York is not only the most international city in the world, but the one with the most languages and dialects spoken. The variety of languages is enormous and ranges from pre-Columbian to Native American languages. Many are at risk of disappearing.
Downtown there are traces of indigenous communities such as the Cherokee, Lenope and Lakota, alongside people who have passed down the Judeo-Hispanic, the Mapuche dialect, while on the Upper West Side there are traces of the Mojave language, the native tribe of California . In Hell’s Kitchen, archaic forms of Irish survive, including Scottish Gaelic and, going south, Armenian, Maori and Gilbertese, a Micronesian language spoken in Kiribati, founded on the Latin alphabet and widespread in the Pacific Ocean, from Fiji to the Islands Solomon. East of Central Park there are mini communities in which they still use Chamorro, a language spoken in Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands, West Ambae, which comes from Oceania, Sorani, a dialect of the Kurdish populations of Iraq, Purhépeca, language of the Native Americans of Michoacán, a state in western Mexico.
There are microcosms that live a life of their own, a stone’s throw from the skyscrapers. For example, the one where Seke is spoken, a dialect widespread in a handful of villages in Nepal, with a total of seven hundred people, of whom 150 live in a building in Brooklyn. But there is also Bishnupriya Manipuri, the language of a minority in Bangladesh, which has taken root in Queens. Ikhlil Mardakhayev teaches the Juhuri language in Brooklyn, a Persian-Jewish language spoken throughout the world by between 100,000 and 200,000 people, especially in Israel and the United States. The Bronx is a land of African dialects: among others, Balanta-Ganja, Jol, Maninka, Fulani, Konyanka, Gorma and Kriol have been recorded here.
How much longer they will be spoken about, no one knows. For now the dialects are part of the seven hundred languages of New York. Each person can be a language, a past, a distant village. And as long as even one remains, his language will not have disappeared.
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– 2024-04-01 07:29:51
