Ross Perlin
Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York
(Grove Atlantic, February 2024)

A New York Times Notable Book of 2024
Winner of the 2024 British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding
Longlisted for the 2025 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction
Read (and experience) endangered languages in The New York Times Magazine
Featured in The New York Times Book Review
Featured in New York Review of Books
Reviewed in The Wall Street Journal

From the co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, a portrait of contemporary New York City through six speakers of little-known and overlooked languages, diving into the incredible history of the most linguistically diverse place ever to have existed on the planet.

Half of all 7,000-plus human languages may disappear over the next century and—because many have never been recorded—when they’re gone, it will be forever. Ross Perlin, a linguist and co-director of the non-profit Endangered Language Alliance, is racing against time to map little-known languages across the most linguistically diverse city in history: contemporary New York. In Language City, Perlin follows 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 overwhelming odds. He explores the languages themselves, from rare sounds to sentence-long words to bits of grammar that encode entirely different worldviews.

Seke is spoken by 700 people from five ancestral villages in Nepal, and a hundred others living in a single Brooklyn apartment building. N’ko is a radical new West African writing system now going global in Harlem and the Bronx. After centuries of colonization and displacement, Lenape, the city’s original Indigenous language and the source of the name Manhattan (“the place where we get bows”), has just one native speaker, along with a small band of revivalists. Also profiled in the book are speakers of the Indigenous Mexican language Nahuatl, the Central Asian minority language Wakhi, and Yiddish, braided alongside Perlin’s own complicated family legacy.

On the 100th anniversary of a notorious anti-immigration law that closed America’s doors for decades and the 400th anniversary of New York’s colonial founding, Perlin raises the alarm about growing political threats and the onslaught of “killer languages” like English and Spanish. At the same time, Language City celebrates the profound linguistic diversity of a single city and the joy of tuning into this unprecedented Babel.

Praise for Language City:

“[Language City is] what might be called a ‘glorious mosaic’ book. It brings that language map to life in an exhilarating way.”—Ian Frazier, New York Review of Books

“[A] gorgeous new narrative of New York, as told through the hundreds of languages spoken in its five boroughs . . . Perlin’s excellent account of the present-day city chronicles six New Yorkers all working, in some way, to extend the lives of their languages.”—Deirdre Mask, New York Times Book Review

“Superb . . . The heart of Language City is portraits of individual New York-based speakers. Mr. Perlin writes about their work as well as his, capturing the grind of immigrant life with empathy, balance and wit . . . Mr. Perlin can set a scene with quick, sure strokes . . . Wonderfully rich, Language City is in part an introduction to the diverse ways different languages work . . . It is also a brief survey of U.S. immigration, full of piquant detail about its tortuous history.”—Timothy Farrington, Wall Street Journal

“Perlin is an encyclopedist of New York City’s microworlds . . . [Language City is] comprehensive and brilliant . . . Often Borgesian in its profusion of delicious, esoteric detail . . . Ultimately a closely observed, empathetic account of the struggles of immigrants in the city and their tenuous and fraying ties to their homelands. It is destined to be a classic of immigrant literature.”—Karan Mahajan, Bookforum

“An in-depth, fascinating analysis of endangered languages and efforts to preserve them in New York City.”—Library Journal

“[Perlin’s] narrative balances biography and linguistic analysis, letting their lives act as windows into the communities making up the multilingual microcosms of other continents tucked unassumingly into New York . . . Perlin brings the subject of linguistics down from the ivory tower and into the subway car or the corner bodega . . . Language City reinforces the value of endangered language preservation and asks salient questions: What do we lose when we facilitate a monolingual society in both practice and policy? And how can we instead allow diverse languages to create a society that is more equitable, livable and inclusive?”
—Annie Harvieux, BookPage

“[Perlin’s] panoramic, enthralling survey of languages spoken in New York . . . manifests his passion for the tools of his trade — grammar, vocabulary, lingua francas, loan words, even clicks in sub-Saharan Africa — while avoiding the pitfalls of academic texts . . . Perlin’s discussion of indigenous languages is stellar; that ELA has discovered so many native American tongues among the city’s nooks and crannies is both an investigative coup and a marvel of empathy . . . Language City will be one of 2024’s superlative nonfiction titles, a love letter to this inclusive, quixotic, exuberant metropolis.”
—Hamilton Cain, On the Seawall

“This fascinating book for language buffs delves into the past, present, and future of languages in New York City, one of the planet’s most linguistically diverse places.”
—Kelly Fojtik, Booklist

“As home to more than 700 languages, New York is ‘the most linguistically diverse city in the history of the world,’ writes Perlin… in this enthralling account of his attempts to document dozens of the rarest languages that have flourished there. . . The result is an immersive meander through N.Y.C.’s past and present that brings to the fore its multitudinous nature. Readers will be engrossed.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A spirited celebration of a polyglot city. Linguist Perlin, co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance and author of Intern Nation, makes a strong case for the need to support endangered, Indigenous, and primarily oral languages. . . New York’s cultural richness, Perlin asserts, is nourished by languages. A convincing argument for linguistic multiplicity.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Melting pots and mosaics are just metaphors. Ross Perlin reveals the truth of New York’s diversity in this lively, intimate, definitive exploration of the languages it speaks, and the people who speak them. Language City makes it very clear that New York is in no way dying; in fact, it’s the world’s ark.”
—Thomas Dyja, author of New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation

“Astonishing, fascinating, revelatory, exhilarating. It’s beautifully written, clearly organized, powerfully argued. By taking ethnolinguistic groups as his unit of analysis he magnifies and deepens and sharpens our understanding of New York as the churning microcosm of the world it is, and always has been.”—Mike Wallace, co-author of Gotham and author of Greater Gotham

“Ross Perlin gives us a tour showing the city as a smorgasbord of languages from all over the globe, from its founding (Pieter Stuyvesant spoke Frisian) to right now. Language City makes living in New York feel like travel.”—John McWhorter, author of Nine Nasty Words

“A work of sweeping ambition that succeeds on every level: reportorial, explanatory, stylistic, political. Perlin’s clear-eyed, nuanced depiction of immigrant and indigenous speakers fighting to preserve their languages and cultures couldn’t be more timely—and more urgently needed—than it is right now.”—Margalit Fox, author of Talking Hands, The Riddle of the Labyrinth, and The Confidence Men

“What a rich and explosively vital book. Now to all New York’s other superlatives we can add ‘the most linguistically diverse city in the history of the world.’ Perlin chronicles this panoply from the start, augmenting the supposed eighteen languages spoken in New Amsterdam with the likes of Kikongo, Kimbundu, and Frisian. Most importantly, he shows how New York today is nothing less than a sanctuary of endangered languages.”
—Russell Shorto, author of The Island at the Center of the World

“This passionate, learned and fascinating book gives us a portrait of New York like no other: as the home and refuge of one out of every ten languages spoken on earth. Perlin teaches you how to open your ears to the stunning diversity of speech forms on the subway, in the streets of Queens and everywhere else in the city—and it’s not tourists, but New Yorkers you should be listening to. A great service to New York, to language conservation and to us all, this is a wonderful book and deserves to be read by all who want to know what great cities are made of.”
—David Bellos, author of Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything

“For each of the languages to which he devotes a chapter, his book’s organization reveals his tenacity . . . Language City, thoroughly researched and impressively documented in its endnotes, overall succeeds in opening the reader’s eyes and ears to the sounds of the noisy metropolis, where beneath its hum and roar ‘linguistic churn is constant: mixing, shift, loss.'”—John L. Murphy, Spectrum Culture