(Speaking Wakhi) For each person it' s important
to preserve his or her own language.
Because nowadays we are not able to speak our language purely.
(Speaking Mustang (Loke) Now that I've been here
for almost ten years
I can say it depends on us,
on our ability to guide our children to speak our own language,
our ability to make them aware
of the importance of their own language and culture
The Endangered Language Alliance is a nonprofit organization
based here in New York City and we work primarily
with immigrant communities here who speak endangered languages.
(Music)
There's many, many communities now, especially over the last 20, 30 years,
who have come to New York
and have brought their own language
that is being lost back home.
We work with them to document those languages
and to also promote those languages
and to try and better understand how those languages are surviving
and what their life, the life of those languages,
here in New York City.
And we try and educate the public as well, about the value of linguistic diversity
and what language endangerment is.
(Group reciting)
In language we navigate the possibilities we create with one another.
And so if we respect the language we have,
we respect ancestral mediums and knowledge that come through us.
The way this kind of started from a class that I taught in CUNY nine years ago
where I would bring students from the Graduate Center around the city
to work on fieldwork projects with endangered languages.
When I saw that there wa great interest n the part of the students
and there was great interest, more importantly,
on the part of the community and individuals,
that was kind of what gave me a feeling that it could work.
That these are groups that need to be brought together.
You have communities speaking endangered languages,
you have linguists, you have other people
who want to volunteer to helping promote and understand these languages.
I was lucky that I actually went to CUNY.
This is linguistically, culturally, ethnic, why this is diverse,
and you can meet many people there and then learn from them.
If they want to work on a language they have their resources inside.
They have students from Croatia,
there's students from India,
there's students from all parts of the world.
(Boat horn)
New York is really a uniquely place.
We get immigration from all parts of the world
almost equally and
there's very few cities in the
world that can say that so
we have very large and diverse African
community a very large and diverse
Himalayan community, Filipino community,
European communities so in that sense I
feel that New York City is definitely
the most linguistically and ethnically diverse city in the world.
The endangered language Alliance
helped produce this
language map of Queens and anecdotal
language map of Queens for a book called
Nonstop Metropolis by Rebecca Solnit
and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro.
It's filled with fascinating different atlases looking at
all different aspects of the city and
Queens because it's known for its
linguistic diversity the zip code around
Jackson Heights is the most
linguistically diverse ZIP code in all
of the United States and so this map
focuses particularly on Queens and its languages.
We plotted out the languages
that were represented in the library
system so kind of the official national languages
in one color and within those
communities all of the unofficial
languages, the regional languages, local
languages that are, in many cases, not even
recognized as official languages
back home and those are the languages
that that are endangered and that we're more interested in.
By the end of the century we'll lose somewhere between
half to ninety percent
of the world's languages.
You can only imagine what else we'll lose with those languages
Right? Not just the words and the grammatical systems but also
everything that was transmitted in those
languages; the songs, the histories, the
proverbs, the knowledge about the
environment, the knowledge
about how peoples were
historically related to each other.
[Music]
You can say that "okay languages come and go...
it doesn't... like it it's not a big deal"
but it's big deal when it is dying and
we are not doing anything about it.
You know, when all you can speak is English
or Spanish or Chinese then...
that can be, in fact, a reminder that you've lost
what's yours and something foreign has
been forced upon you and you live that every day.
When we think about the riches of our
own language—whatever language that is—
we should imagine that those
riches are duplicated 6,000 times in
every language and to lose that it's
like losing a museum as as one famous linguist said.
[Music]
Recording language creates a permanent
record leverage right so now especially
in the in the digital age a recording is
actually much much more valuable and
easier to work with I would say.
The linguistic record optimally should be
something that's multi-purpose so it's
good for linguist strength to study the
language it's also good for speakers
trying to revive the language perhaps
it's good for trying to understand the
the oral literature the stories and
other aspects that maybe we're not even
thinking about today but that may be
very valuable to look back on in 50 or 100 years.
[Singing]
Active archiving always has to
take into account the different players, the different...
and especially the community
from which it comes from
not to kind of take it away from them and
put it in some digital vault but rather
think of it as a way of facilitating the
community's access to the language.
If you are in a country that English is a
dominant language you need to learn it
but nobody will say that "ok human being
only can speak one language; they cannot
handle two languages".
Yes, they can. If you go to Europe
or you can go to India,
people speak three languages or four languages.
It's just the perspective, if you
change the perspective and you can have
a multilingual America and a happier one.
[Music]