#ross perlin

Gretchen: Cities can not just attract people from different places with different linguistic histories but also sometimes continue those and perpetuate those. You can have groups of people who are still passing that language down onto their kids or using that language in a variety of settings because you can have not just one person who’s using that language but a community of people who are using that language even if they’re not necessarily being counted by traditional metrics like a census or having their linguistic expertise represented on street signs. There are a lot of languages in cities these days and perhaps have always been a lot of languages in cities because cities are these hubs and meeting places.

Lauren: Sometimes, that diversity is really visible if your city has centres like a Chinatown or a Little Italy where groups of migrants have coalesced.

Gretchen: Or an expat compound, which I think we should think of as well as a Little Expat-ily.

Lauren: Oh, absolutely. In Singapore, that was Holland Village. We would sometimes go and visit because it had really good Mexican food available.

Gretchen: So, going to the presumably relatively Western Anglo-expat community to eat the food of yet a different place because probably Americans are bringing Mexican food with them, I guess, I dunno.

Lauren: Absolutely, yes. Different ways that migrant groups can coalesce – it can be quite visible.

Gretchen: And who we think of as an “expat” versus who we think of as a “migrant” definitely has this power dynamic of the level of wealth, the level of whiteness of these different groups as we’re talking about them, but nonetheless, there are these different linguistic histories in pretty much any city that you think about even when they’re not visible.

Lauren: Yeah, there’s all this diversity that isn’t visible. Sometimes, groups of migrants will unite around maybe the national language from where they’ve come from or a larger lingua franca because they’re somewhere new, which might make that diversity less visible. People coming from Nepal might all just identify in Australia as Nepali-speakers to make that easier to comprehend in this new space.

Gretchen: Even if when they were in Nepal or when you start asking more deeply, they actually speak a dozen languages or a hundred languages that are all spoken in Nepal.

Lauren: Yeah, I mean, not one person –

Gretchen: No, not one person speaking a hundred languages, but as a group, yes.

Lauren: That would be very impressive. Yes, as a group you might have this richer diversity within. Nepali has this dominant status in Nepal. You get people coming into the urban centres like Kathmandu where there’s diversity there, but then coming to Australia, there’s this extra layer of abstraction. We have lots of Nepali migrants coming to Australia at the moment and bringing this extra layer of culture and bringing all their own languages as well as that formal language of education.

Gretchen: I think you see this sometimes happening with immigrants from Mexico or from Central America who may all get classified as “Hispanic” or “Latino” and yet actually speak a bunch of different Mayan languages or other Indigenous languages of the area, or people who are coming from former Soviet countries who are sort of united around Russian as a lingua franca from the area but may actually speak Tajik or something like that.

Lauren: Sometimes, that’s just a way to make a community. Sometimes, it’s because the country that they’re migrating to or the space they’re migrating to (in the way that they conduct things like censuses or provide services) make it more strategically useful to align around those larger languages.

Gretchen: And they’re not always migratory histories. One of the interesting things, for me, about learning ASL in Montreal over the last year and a half is that it’s adding this extra layer to the way in which I understand a city that I’ve lived in for quite a while because sign languages don’t have written forms that are in common use. I don’t see them on the street signs in that way that I know where the Portuguese people settled in Montreal or which neighbourhood has the best bubble tea – these kinds of things – but there is a layer of Deaf events that I’m being told about which was information that I didn’t have before and changes my linguistic understanding of the city. I’ve also been learning about which Canadian cities have had schools for the d/Deaf and how that maps onto modern day Deaf communities, which is also a lens that I haven’t thought about Canada or North American through.

Lauren: That’s so nice. I think it’s part of that finding new ways into that richness of a city that can be really rewarding.

Gretchen: I’ve also recently been reading this book called Language City by a linguist named Ross Perlin. This is a book about the incredible linguistic variety found in New York City and how various people are doing different kinds of language work. He picks six specific languages to focus on for the book and then also does this earlier history of New York because there’s a temptation to be like, “Oh, well, migration’s been happening a lot more in recent decades” or “since World War II” or since some of the racist immigration quotas were lifted against people being able to immigrate from various countries. One of the things I appreciate about the introduction for this book is pointing even things like “New York” was once “New Amsterdam” and because the island of Manhattan is so strategically located, it has also been a gathering point for Indigenous people. One of the six languages that he profiles is Lenape, which is the language that the word “manhattan” comes from, which still has an active language revitalisation effort going with respect to it. He profiles a woman who’s working on that, and he profiles a specific person for each of the languages that he talks about.

Lauren: It’s so nifty that New York has this incredibly long history as a place of confluence and a meeting point because where Melbourne has been built is at the meeting place of the traditional lands of a number of language groups within the larger Kulin Nation here in Victoria. It’s interesting to see cities replicating these existing spaces as meeting points and points of connection, often because they are located on strategic waterways. It’s not a complete coincidence. But it’s interesting to see those parallels between New York and other cities.

Gretchen: The same thing in Montreal actually that it’s also been a meeting place for a variety of Indigenous people. These days the Mohawk or Kanien'kehá:ka are the ones that have a reserve across the river, but when people are doing a full land acknowledgement, there’s like, depending on who’s doing it, there’ll be anywhere from two to ten different nations that are cited.

Lauren: What are the six languages that Perlin focuses on?

Gretchen: One of them is Seke, which is spoken by 700 people originally from five villages in Nepal, 100 of which have lived in this one apartment building in Brooklyn for a while now.

Lauren: Amazing.

Gretchen: Do you know this language – because you’ve worked in Nepal?

Lauren: I do know of Seke. When you told me this chapter was in the book, I did specifically read this chapter. I love how the community refer to it as the “vertical village.”

Gretchen: Because it’s in a tall apartment building, there’s this sense that they’ve replicated aspects of the village in a tall building in Brooklyn. N’Ko, which is a new West African writing system that’s used for several Manding languages that’s being used also in Harlem and the Bronx for speakers of those languages. Lenape as I mentioned, the original Indigenous language where “manhattan” originally means “the place where we get bows” – it grew a type of wood that had that. And then Nahuatl, which is an Indigenous language of Mexico, possibly notable as the language that we get words like “tomato” and “chocolate” from via Spanish contact.

Lauren: I’ve heard of those.

Gretchen: Yes. Wakhi, which is a language spoken in Central Asia. And Yiddish, which is described in the description as “the former lingua franca of the Lower East Side,” which may mean more to people who live in New York than I do. A lot of the promotional text is like, “You can go on a tour of the world by staying in New York.” It’s got this very granular, very detailed perspective at not just these six languages we’re using as our lens but using them as a way to talk about, well, all of the speakers that I profiled here are multilingual. What other languages do they know? What are the languages the people they talk to use? How do they make linguistic choices? What kinds of things are they doing in terms of writing things down or recording things or trying to teach other people things? How are they doing this various different kinds of language work and in what context are they doing it?

Lauren: A lot of the challenges around making multilingualism visible for these communities and for the wider community – visible in the education system, in media, in terms of access to necessary services. Part of this is also how it’s visible in official records which then feeds into all of the above in terms of allocation of resources.

Gretchen: One of the stats that stood out to me from the beginning part of this book was that the census – the official census records – showed that there are about 70 languages being used in New York City at the moment.

Lauren: Which is a lot.

Gretchen: I mean, it’s certainly more languages than I speak! But then Ross Perlin and the organisation that he works with, which is the Endangered Language Alliance, they have talked with people who use 700 languages in New York City alone.

Lauren: Okay, that’s an order of magnitude more.

Gretchen: That is a really great illustration of what the concept of “order of magnitude” means. It’s literally 10 times as much. When you think about any of the types of infrastructural things that a city does for its residents, being only aware of, let’s say, Nepali speakers or, let’s say, Spanish speakers or, let’s say, Russian speakers and not of Seke speakers or Nahuatl speakers or Wakhi speakers as people whose Russian or Spanish or Nepali – it may not actually be the language that they’re most comfortable in. That’s a whole different paradigm in terms of what languages we think of the city as speaking or we think of as being readily accessible within that city.

Lauren: This reminds me of a question that we got in our linguistics advice episode of someone who wanted to engage with Tzotzil, which is the heritage language from their grandmother, but now they live in the US, and they don’t have ready access to that community anymore.

Gretchen: Something that struck me in particular when we got that question, which I think was a great question, is that Tzotzil I’m pretty sure is a Mayan language, at least, if I’m getting it correctly. I know people in Montreal (linguists) who have worked with speakers of other Mayan languages, which at first surprised me because I don’t think of Montreal as being a Mecca for speakers of Mayan languages, but it goes, again, in that sense of like, urban environments are – and sometimes also rural environments – can be much more multilingual than we give them credit for and that if a linguist who was really dedicated to trying to work with Mayan speakers was able to move to Montreal and be like, “Oh, I wanna find some more speakers of these languages that I’ve been working on for a while. How can I reach out to community groups or try to figure out who might know someone who knows someone who knows other people who might speak one of these languages?”, this is the kind of thing that is a lot more possible in bigger cities than we sometimes realise it is.

Lauren: In fact, Ross Perlin works for an organisation called the Endangered Language Alliance that does this kind of connecting with speakers of languages where they’ve migrated to New York, but they still want to engage with their language. I think the work that the Endangered Language Alliance does and the way Perlin talks about it in the book is a really great example of how there’s this respect for urban speakers of languages. There’s a false narrative we can play into about authenticity and the need for language to be spoken in a particular place or a particular, often, bucolically rural setting in this imagined world. I really love that the ELA and a lot of other similar organisations respect migrants and urban language speakers as well.

Gretchen: As I was reading this book and seeing all of the examples about New York, I kept thinking, “Oh, yeah, I think this is also true about a lot of other places.” The Endangered Language Alliance actually has an offshoot organisation that’s operated out of Toronto, which is a Canadian city where over 50% of its inhabitants were not born in Canada.

Lauren: There you go. Probably a few languages spoken there.

Gretchen: There’s a few languages spoken there! Some of them are gonna be your relatively big, multinational languages, you know, French and Spanish and Russian and things like that, but some of these are also going to be relatively smaller or minoritised languages whose speakers might like to connect with other people who are going through similar efforts to try to revitalise them or just appreciate having access to an office space with a microphone or things like that. There’re some very concrete ways that connecting organisations like this can sometimes help all these smaller individualised local projects to keep working on promoting their language.

Lauren: I also love that because cities are geographically integrated but also technologically integrated, you get things like the Endangered Language Project where they set up online mentoring for people who are interested in working on maintaining or renewing their heritage languages or their own linguistic projects. They make use of the fact they have these language mentors who can easily connect through the magic of the internet.

Gretchen: And also, a lot of people have internet access these days, and so even if they are living in a smaller area, many places are still connected to the internet and can have video calls or emails with other people who are potentially doing similar things even if they are in smaller areas.

Lauren: There are also projects that are more targeted to specific groups. Living Languages is an organisation in Australia that specifically works with Indigenous language groups and can provide that really tailored language support for them and the project that they want to work on.

Gretchen: Things like taking a reference grammar of the language or a dictionary of the language and trying to convert that into materials that are actually useful for people who are trying to learn the language or increase their ability to use the language and don’t necessarily have the academic background to use drier materials – that’s what I think of Living Languages as doing.

Lauren: That kind of project is so important because a lot of work with the world’s linguistic diversity happens in a really academic setting, but often for really academic ends that don’t necessarily meet the aims and desires of community members.

Gretchen: Ideally, organisations like this can help support the actual aims of people in the communities, which may be different from each other, but are almost certainly different from outsiders who are getting supported by national funding bodies that want the contribution to scientific research or other organisations that have their own aims and goals that aren’t being driven by what people who have this family connection to the language actually want.

Lauren: I also love the sustainability toolkit that’s been put together by Living Tongues and Wikitongues – very cognate group names there. They work together. It’s all online. It’s all there to help people start with the project of “I want to keep using my language. How might I do that?” and not necessarily presuming people have linguistics training.

Gretchen: Wikitongues also do a lot of just videos of as many languages as they can talk to. I think they end up getting found by a lot of people who type the name of their language into a search bar and are like, “I wonder what’s on the internet in this particular language,” and they come across a video of someone telling a story in that language, and they’re like, “Oh, cool, this is on the internet somewhere.” It can be fun to click around and see some examples of people using language in various settings. But I think they also got their start in urban environments filming people who they’d met who had some sort of language story to tell. They’re not restricted to only minoritised languages. They’re just like, “We wanna try to record all the languages, which are some very large global languages and some much smaller ones.”

Lauren: We got another question in that advise episode that stumped us a bit about learning local, urban languages in your neighbourhood as an outsider and not necessarily as a member of that community. We found that to be a really difficult question.

Gretchen: I think it is complicated because it’s one thing to say, “My grandmother spoke this language; I want to try to reconnect with that.” It’s another thing to say, “Wow, languages! I just get really excited about them. But as far as I know, my ancestors, for any number of generations, has spoke English” or Spanish or another one of these big, global, coloniser languages, “Can I do something with this interest that is helpful and doesn’t come across as patronising or actually create more problems than it solves?” or something like that.

Lauren: It’s true a lot of the organisations and programmes we just discussed are usually staffed by or volunteer run by a combination of people who are working on their own languages and supportive allies but always with the focus of what language speakers want as the driving interest.

Gretchen: I think a lot of this work is very relationally based. Becoming friends with a particular community and staying around long enough that you’re committed to doing something, and you aren’t just coming in to do one research project and then get your degree and back out and leave and extract value from a particular community without contributing anything – I think building this type of relationship takes a lot of time and takes a lot of commitment to building that type of trust. But if you have a more casual interest like, a lot of these organisations will have something like an email newsletter that you can sign up for. Maybe they have a fund drive – you chip in a few bucks. That’s a way to be supportive without trying to centre yourself and your own interests. If you’re just like, “Man, I do wish people who were doing this type of research had more to work with. Maybe that’s something that I could be somewhat informed at without saying, ‘Oh, this needs to all be about me and my interests’.”

Lauren: I really liked you telling me about these examples from Language City where Perlin was explaining situations where outsider attention (and straight up financial support) is changing group attitudes to their relationship with their language and its relationship to their larger linguistic repertoire.

Gretchen: He has a couple of examples where people would come into the Endangered Language Alliance office and be like, “Oh, well, of course I speak four or five languages because I’ve just had to learn to use them in various contexts, and you mean you want to pay me pretty good money to come in and record stories in the least famous of those languages (or the least prestigious of them) that I grew up speaking with my grandmother, but that isn’t any of the ones I’ve had to learn subsequently in order to be able to do jobs or migration or schooling or these other types of things?” In some cases, it’s led to a renewed sense of interest on the parts of the speakers to say, “Oh, maybe I do wanna do that.” Other people were already there on their own level of interest, but sometimes being like, “Oh, there is this outside attention,” can be positive, according to his experience. It’s interesting to see a dynamic there where it’s not always like the outsider coming in and polluting with their demands. It’s also sometimes that this can really be a mutually beneficial relationship.

Lauren: I sometimes wonder what language justice would really look like. I think it’s this really complex alignment of what individuals want for their language and what policy and infrastructure can provide to support those desires.

Gretchen: I think that’s a really hard question and not one that I’m promising that we can answer in a 40-minute episode, but there are some interesting pointers in that direction on the website of Coalition for Language Rights. They have this concept of language rights that they’ve put together quite a short statement about it. It’s written in quite accessible language, and they’ve got it translated into a bunch of different languages on the site. Shall we just read the statement out? It’s pretty short.

Lauren: Yeah, let’s read it. “What are language rights?”

Gretchen: “You should be able to use your language wherever and however you want.”

Lauren: “Can you use your language at school? Can you use it in hospitals and with doctors? Can you communicate with the government in your language? Can you use your language at work?”

Gretchen: “When you can do all this, you have language rights. If you can’t, then someone took away your language rights.”

Lauren: “Can you hear and see your language on TV, radio, books, newspapers, and the internet? Can you pass your language to future generations in the ways you choose?”

Gretchen: “When you can do all this, you have language rights. If you can’t, then someone took away your language rights.”

Lauren: “You have language rights when you can use your language without worrying about how other people will treat you. Nobody should insult or attack you because of how you speak, sign, or write.”

Gretchen: “Nobody should say that your language is worse than other languages. If you or your language are treated badly, then someone took away your language rights.”

Lauren: “You have language rights when you and your community can make decisions about your language. You can decide what name to call your language.”

Gretchen: “Nobody can say you don’t have a real language. If your community can’t make these decisions, then someone took away your language rights.”

Lauren: “If someone took away your language rights, you can do something about it. You can defend your language rights.”

Gretchen: “You need to figure out who took away your language rights and tell everyone about it. You can talk to people, protest in the street, use social media, write letters.”

Lauren: “Defending language rights can be difficult. Sometimes, it is dangerous. But it is also important. People all around the world are working to defend their language rights.”

Gretchen: “It’s good if we all work together no matter what languages we use. The Global Coalition for Language Rights works to defend everyone’s language rights. Join us.”

Lauren: I love it so much.

Gretchen: I also really like the blog post that they have reflecting on how they constructed this statement. It was constructed by a group of people who work in language activism in varying directions. They talked about how there’re other kinds of rights that people are aware that we should have or that we ought to have even if they aren’t necessarily being respected 100% of the time. People have a sense that they ought to have a right to free speech – can sometimes protest that their free speech rights are being violated – which, you know, with free speech, that’s really more like the government shouldn’t be able to imprison you for how you speak. It’s less like someone else can’t also criticise you – exercising their rights to free speech. Sometimes, free speech rights get a little bit confused. But there isn’t the same concept so much that you should have a right to use your language, to have it recognised, to be able to use it in official contexts, and to be allowed to say that it’s a real language, and that this right is much more respected for some languages than others, and for some varieties within certain languages than others, and that even raising awareness that this is something that ought to be the case even if it isn’t yet the case is one important aspect of this attempt to fight for language rights.

Lauren: I think it’s also really powerful as a tool if you’re sitting here being like, “Oh, yes, obviously all this is true for me and my experiences,” it shows that you’re operating from a particular privilege to which not everyone currently has the right.

Gretchen: Yeah, exactly. It’s something that is unequally distributed at the moment.

Lauren: Another really useful resource in thinking about what it might look like to have the same opportunities for all languages is a recently published Journalist Guide to Reporting on Indigenous and Minoritised languages.

Gretchen: This is a great resource from the First Peoples’ Cultural Council of Canada, which does a lot of this work in the Canadian context. They put out this journalist guide, again, with a lot of consultation with different groups of people. It’s a relatively short guide. We will link to the 23-page PDF, which has lots of nice graphics. It’s not 23 pages of dense text. One of the things that I liked which is about that guide (which is something that the Global Coalition language rights statement does) is emphasise that someone takes these language rights away. If people aren’t using a language anymore, it’s not because it’s died a natural death. It’s because there is an agent which is sometimes a government or sometimes people in positions of power that create these incentives by which people make this very rational choice to say, “Actually, I don’t want my kids being discriminated against the way I was, and so I’m not going to pass this language on to them. I’m going to pass on this more majoritarian language instead.”

Lauren: In this guide for journalists, what they point to is that minoritised and Indigenous languages are often framed in a deficit model, whereas we can do a lot to more positively represent languages by framing in them in the model that they are an asset.

Gretchen: And that people are doing things to change the situation. They’re working together in groups. They can have pride in the efforts that they’re doing so far. They’re bringing things towards thinking about the future – rather than some of the narratives which are like, “Oh, this ancient language isn’t being spoken anymore.” Like, [deficit model voice] “This ancient language isn’t even surviving. Some external person is coming in and saving it” or “some app is gonna come in and save it.”

Lauren: Love your deficit model voice.

Gretchen: [Laughs] Thank you. I wanna make it clear that I don’t endorse this. Rather than, okay, people who are in the community are working to gain more support for their language or working to claim it again or to connect with other people who are trying to use it more and that sometimes people who are outsiders can be in a supportive role, but they’re not gonna come in externally and save it. That’s something that happens within the community by building those connections.

Lauren: I feel really positive this is a discourse we’re seeing shift over the last few decades. It’s two decades ago we had David Crystal’s Language Death book, which I think was a really important part of making clear we’re going through a really massive period of change and that a lot of languages are being denied opportunities and speakers of languages are being denied their language rights. But now we have different framings. I also think about Nick Evans’ book, which in its first edition was called Dying Words (some 15 years ago) –

Gretchen: Again, this focuses us on the deficit.

Lauren: Mm-hm, and the second edition has been re-titled to Words of Wonder. You can see publishers are beginning to get their head around the damaging problems with the deficit model.

Gretchen: I feel like when I started becoming aware of this work, which was when I was doing a linguistics undergrad degree, when I was in grad school, which was some time ago now, there was some of the earlier stages of saying, “Let’s shift away from talking about ‘endangered languages’ to talking about ‘language revitalisation’.” I had someone tell me at a conference just last week saying, “Oh, we’re not saying ‘revitalisation’ anymore. That’s too negative. We’re saying, ‘reclamation’.” “Endangered” itself was one step more positive than “dying” or “death” and moving towards “sleeping languages” or “dormant languages” that could be brought back, and also this idea of reclaiming space for language that’s not just revitalising it in terms of bringing some of the words back but also claiming spaces in which to use those words as part of everyday life or to use that language as part of everyday life. I think that there’s been this trajectory of gradually shifting different ways that people talk about it as we think about it differently and as we try to frame it differently.

Lauren: I think in Language City, Perlin is doing something very interesting focusing on the nuance and not over-generalising and talking about individuals and their communities and their experiences as a really rich way of telling the story of how languages live in urban settings.

Gretchen: And also a way of shifting that discourse from this idea that marginalised languages tend to be spoken in these remoter communities, which is still in many cases true, but also that they can be spoken in a much closer environment to the presumably urban (although not necessarily all urban) readers of a book like this to say, actually, you might be walking down the street and cross paths with someone who’s speaking one of these languages. You might be sharing a subway car with someone who’s speaking one of these languages. They’re a lot closer to the experience of the presumed urban reader than some of the other reporting-on-language stuff. Perlin’s book brings attention to a different spectrum of these different language experiences. When we talk about minoritised languages, there’s this interesting duality to it where, on the one hand, you have these really big international-type efforts of “We’re going to get all of the minoritised languages together, and we’re gonna have the United Nations decade for Indigenous languages,” or “We’re gonna have the Endangered Languages Alliance” and these organisations with many names that feel like variations on a similar theme.

Lauren: Which are all important symbolic things in themselves.

Gretchen: Right. Doing things like raising awareness of language rights or connecting people who are working on similar types of projects who don’t necessarily know each other is really valuable work – and also incredibly valuable work is the very local community-based work that’s happening at all of the individual levels where a few speakers of a particular language, or a few signers of a particular language, are saying, “I’m gonna take it upon myself to create some materials” or “to have a language class” or “ to use this language with my kids even though I don’t know a whole lot of other people who’re doing that,” and do this language activism work at the language specific level. Because all of the global connections in the world aren’t going to change that each of these languages is also very local. I find when I’m thinking about this type of work, I end up zooming in and out a lot between the incredibly local and the incredibly global.

Lauren: I think that’s what is really at the heart of the richness of the urban experience is this tension between these big stories and these really small stories as well.

Gretchen: Do you know that thing where sometimes you walk down a busy street and you see every individual person that’s passing you by, and you’re thinking, “Each of these people is having their own day right now.” Like, “I’m having my day, and I’m aware that I’m late for this thing that I’m going to” or “that I’m hungry” or “that I’m having this experience,” and each of these people that I’m passing by as if they’re just a minor player in my day, they are all each having their own days. You have to not think about this all the time because otherwise you’ll never be able to walk down a street at all ever. But sometimes you can have this realisation that like, “Ah, everyone has this incredibly rich inner world that they’re living, and I’m a bit player in the background of their day the way they’re a bit player in the background of my day.” I think about this sometimes when it comes to languages where all of the languages that I don’t know that are maybe, if I’m lucky, a name on a page somewhere for me, that are someone else’s entire world, and so deeply and emotionally resonant and important to that person in the way that my linguistic experiences are negligible to them. There’s so much that exists in the world and in the minds of people around us, and we’re lucky that books and conversations with people can sometimes let us catch a glimpse of other people’s realities.

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