Contemporary cities are the most linguistically diverse in history, even as an estimated half of the world's 7000-plus languages are endangered. In comtemporary New York City, the Endangered Language Alliance (ELA) has mapped over 700 of those languages, including many that are indigenous, primarily oral, and little documented. Driven by new forms of mobility, migration, and the diasporization of nearly every ethnolinguistic group, many other diverse cities around the world are not far behind. In this talk, Ross Perlin, ELA’s co-director and author of the recent book Language City, will describe New York's complex linguistic history and ELA’s efforts over the last 15 years, before panning out to discuss the impact of migration, diaspora, and multilingualism on urban linguistic diversity more generally, with a range of political, economic, social, and cultural implications.

About the speaker:

Ross Perlin, Lecturer, Department of Slavic Languages, Columbia University, is co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance (ELA), a non-profit research institute focused on documenting and supporting endangered languages in New York City and beyond. At ELA since 2013, he directed the creation of the Languages of New York City map (www.languagemap.nyc) and has managed a variety of projects focused on language documentation, language policy, and public programming around urban linguistic diversity. Himalayan languages are a research focus — for his PhD in Linguistics at the University of Bern, Ross created a trilingual dictionary, a corpus of recordings, and a descriptive grammar of Trung, an endangered language of southwest China, based on several years of fieldwork. Ross has a BA from Stanford, an M.Phil. from Cambridge, and an MA from the University of London (SOAS). Ross is also a writer and translator, whose work has appeared in the New York Times, The Guardian, Harper's, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. His most recent book is Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York, published in 2024 by Grove.