Patrick Cox

Patrick Cox

Patrick Cox runs The World's language desk. He reports and edits stories about the globalization of English, the bilingual brain, translation technology and more. He also hosts The World's podcast on language, The World in Words.

Language Life and Death in New York City

January 16, 2013 ⋅ Post a comment
Brooklyn Bridge, New York (Photo: Reuters/Shannon Stapleton)

Brooklyn Bridge, New York (Photo: Reuters/Shannon Stapleton)

Linguist Mark Turin takes us on a whirlwind tour of New York City to explore a few of its 800 languages. Some thrive, at least briefly. Some survive in spite of the odds. Some live on through the words they loan to English and other immigrant tongues. But nearly all of them eventually die.

This is the final part of a BBC series called Our Language in Your Hands. In the first part, Turin returns to a village in Nepal where two decades ago he learned and documented the Thangmi language. In the second part, he’s in South Africa to assess how its languages are faring nearly 20 years after the end of Apartheid.

Here’s a related BBC post on part three. And here’s a 2012 story that we did on a Garifuna language music project that was sponsored by the New York-based Endangered Language Alliance.

Discussion

One comment for “Language Life and Death in New York City”

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1551464350 Paul Venturo

    Lost dialects – I was born in Pretoro, Provinci di Chieti, Abruzzo, Italy.  The only places I can hear our Pretorese dialect – similar to Napoletana – anymore are among my extended family members in metro Boston, Ottawa, Toronto, New Canaan, CT and Kenilworth, NJ.  I’m 50, the generations that followed me were all schooled in proper Italian and it filtered up to their elders.