Your ride to language diversity. Photo by Ad Meskens (own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia CommonsHome to around 800 different languages, New York is a delight for linguists. It also provides a rich hunting ground for those trying to document languages threatened with extinction.
To hear the many languages of New York, just board the subway. The number 7 line, which leads from Flushing in Queens to Times Square in the heart of Manhattan takes you on a journey which would thrill the heart of a linguistic anthropologist. Each stop along the line takes you into a different linguistic universe – Korean, Chinese, Spanish, Bengali, Gujarati, Nepali.
And it is not just the language spoken on the streets that changes. Street signs and business names are also transformed, even those advertising the services of major multinational banks or hotel chains. In the subway, the information signs warning passengers to avoid the electrified rails are written in seven different languages.
But as I have discovered, New York is not just a city where many languages live, it is also a place where languages go to die, the final destination for the last speakers of some of the planet’s most critically endangered speech forms. Of the world’s approximately 6,500 languages, UNESCO believe that up to half are critically endangered and may pass out of use before the end of this century.
Immediately we think of remote Himalayan valleys or the highlands of Papua New Guinea, bucolic rural villages where little known languages are still spoken by handfuls of speakers. But languages can die on the 26th floor of skyscrapers too. New York City is one of the most linguistically rich locations on earth, the perfect location to conduct research on endangered languages.[Read the rest of the article]: The World’s Most Linguistically Diverse Location? New York CityAuthor informationMark TurinProgram Director of the Yale Himalaya Initiative, YaleOriginal article: The World’s Most Linguistically Diverse Location? New York City©2013 PopAnth - Hot Buttered Humanity. All Rights Reserved.
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