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Aug. 29th, 2024 08:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsThe thing about Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues In New York is that when you're talking about a city in terms of its least-spoken languages, you have to be so wonderfully specific. It's not 'Italian immigration,' it's what regions of the area we now know as Italy, and why, and how, and what languages were spoken there, and how those different groups interacted with each other once they were in NYC in different ways than they did in their originally locations.
The first half of Language City presents a kind of linguistic-historical overview of New York; the second half focuses on six speakers of various languages, including Seke, Wakhi, Yiddish, N'ko, Nahuatl and Lenape, who are working with the Endangered Language Alliance (with which the author, Ross Perlin, is affiliated) to preserve and revitalize those languages. It's a good selection of case studies, with interesting variety both in the particular circumstances of the language, how the speakers became particular advocates, and what they hoped to accomplish.
Obviously the Yiddish section made this of particular interest to me, but I found the whole book really fascinating. Perlin is deeply interested in patterns of language shift around migration and cultural connection or collision, has a knack for compelling detail, and doesn't shy away from difficult discussions like the frequent ties between language revitalization and rising nationalism. For me, the book overall struck a really good balance between detailed linguistics discussion, related historical and sociological context, and illustrative personal detail.
Occasionally he got Very Dramatic in his prose style and I wanted to gently tell him to put the alliteration down, and other times he put himself more in the narrative than I would like -- Mr. Perlin, I understand that you are passionate about languages but I personally do not think you should have gone to knock on the door of the last living native speaker of Lenape out of the blue, and I wish I had not heard about it -- but, on the other hand, without the personal anecdotes I would not have gotten the story about going to a market in Tajikistan and finding that an ELA video of someone singing a lullabye in her local endangered language had been remixed into a music video with a sick beat dropped under it and was selling like hot on local DVD, which IMO was the most charming thing in the whole book. Also, I eventually had to just keep my pinky finger tucked into the endnotes so I could easily flip back and forth, because a solid 50% of the endnote provided either a really great anecdote or a citation of a book that I would love to read. I ended up taking pictures on my phone of the entire endnote section before giving the book back to the library.
By the time I was done, I wanted to read another dozen books like it giving me the linguistic histories of various other cities; New York is exceptional in a couple of respects but the language-up version of history and sociology was genuinely such a particular delight for me as an approach that I'm hungry for more of it. Also, unsurprisingly, it was very helpful in re-motivating me regarding putting more work into Yiddish! though Yiddish is honestly in a pretty good position compared to some of the other languages highlighted in this book...
The first half of Language City presents a kind of linguistic-historical overview of New York; the second half focuses on six speakers of various languages, including Seke, Wakhi, Yiddish, N'ko, Nahuatl and Lenape, who are working with the Endangered Language Alliance (with which the author, Ross Perlin, is affiliated) to preserve and revitalize those languages. It's a good selection of case studies, with interesting variety both in the particular circumstances of the language, how the speakers became particular advocates, and what they hoped to accomplish.
Obviously the Yiddish section made this of particular interest to me, but I found the whole book really fascinating. Perlin is deeply interested in patterns of language shift around migration and cultural connection or collision, has a knack for compelling detail, and doesn't shy away from difficult discussions like the frequent ties between language revitalization and rising nationalism. For me, the book overall struck a really good balance between detailed linguistics discussion, related historical and sociological context, and illustrative personal detail.
Occasionally he got Very Dramatic in his prose style and I wanted to gently tell him to put the alliteration down, and other times he put himself more in the narrative than I would like -- Mr. Perlin, I understand that you are passionate about languages but I personally do not think you should have gone to knock on the door of the last living native speaker of Lenape out of the blue, and I wish I had not heard about it -- but, on the other hand, without the personal anecdotes I would not have gotten the story about going to a market in Tajikistan and finding that an ELA video of someone singing a lullabye in her local endangered language had been remixed into a music video with a sick beat dropped under it and was selling like hot on local DVD, which IMO was the most charming thing in the whole book. Also, I eventually had to just keep my pinky finger tucked into the endnotes so I could easily flip back and forth, because a solid 50% of the endnote provided either a really great anecdote or a citation of a book that I would love to read. I ended up taking pictures on my phone of the entire endnote section before giving the book back to the library.
By the time I was done, I wanted to read another dozen books like it giving me the linguistic histories of various other cities; New York is exceptional in a couple of respects but the language-up version of history and sociology was genuinely such a particular delight for me as an approach that I'm hungry for more of it. Also, unsurprisingly, it was very helpful in re-motivating me regarding putting more work into Yiddish! though Yiddish is honestly in a pretty good position compared to some of the other languages highlighted in this book...
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Date: 2024-08-31 07:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-09-06 02:33 am (UTC)