(by Ross Perlin)<\/p>\n
The multilingual nature of NYC is obvious to anyone who’s been here, but before reading this book I didn’t really grasp the full extent of the city’s linguistic diversity: over seven hundred languages are spoken here (out of an estimated total of about 7000 languages in the whole world), including a number of endangered ones. This book is partly about the history of NYC over the centuries and how the city ended up being so linguistically diverse, and partly about six particular endangered languages, through the lens of six people who speak them, and I found all of it super interesting, whether I was being reminded of places I’ve been to (like Gottscheer Hall in Queens) or learning about places and communities I had never heard of (like the cluster of Seke speakers in Brooklyn, who come from five villages in northern Nepal). <\/p>\n
I love passages like this, where Perlin is writing about the part of Brooklyn where those Seke speakers live: “It all looks very ordinary, but this square mile is home to a Ghanaian evangelical church, a Russian banya, a florist\/bar for hipsters, a Juhuri-speaking synagogue for the Jews of Azerbaijan and Daghestan, Dominican hair salons, Pakistani auto body shops, Haitian dollar-van stops, an organization of Darfuri refugees, a Cambodian Buddhist wat, an Albanian mosque, a Panamanian bar, and a restaurant where Uzbek Uber drivers swig bottles of Jameson while savoring fine kebabs. Certain worlds here intersect, but most never do and never need to.” (And yes, as someone who goes to Brooklyn beer bars, I have definitely been to the bar\/flower shop, and next time I go I want to take a walk around the neighborhood and keep an eye out for those other places that Perlin mentions!)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
(by Ross Perlin) The multilingual nature of NYC is obvious to anyone who’s been here, but before reading this book I didn’t really grasp the full extent of the city’s linguistic diversity: over seven hundred languages are spoken here (out of an estimated total of about 7000 languages in the whole world), including a number […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nonfiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14486","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14486"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14486\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14500,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14486\/revisions\/14500"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}