Babel in Reverse: Future Tense
BABEL IN REVERSE
by Ross Perlin
Future Tense
Is today peak diversity? Between closing borders, changes in immigration policy, language and culture loss everywhere, and the rising costs of city life, linguistic diversity in New York is under threat. During the Covid pandemic, speakers of less common languages were immediately among the hardest hit and at times at a life-or-death disadvantage, as language access and interpretation became significant factors.
The current string of emergencies began for many of the city’s multilingual immigrant communities in 2016. A raft of Trump administration policies — including the 2017 Muslim ban, limits on refugees and asylum seekers (tightened further last month), aggressive ICE raids, and continuing threats to abolish birthright citizenship, family-based immigration and the Diversity Visa Lottery — pushed speakers of minority, indigenous, and endangered languages even further to the margins. Yet despite the worsening climate for immigrants, the appeal of economic opportunity and religious, cultural, and personal freedoms in the United States is not only global in scope, but is now (increasingly through technology) reaching the world’s most culturally diverse regions, from Guatemala to Gambia.
New York City, with its long history as an immigration gateway, is one of the places where the effects of the new global migration are penetrating most deeply — and the results are unequivocal. The city is safer, more prosperous, and more diverse than at any point in its history. It’s also far more interesting. Day in, day out, recent multilingual immigrants power the city along every dimension.
The arrival of these communities from around the world — often thousands strong in the city, but little-known to outsiders — benefits both the city (and by extension, the country) and the communities themselves. The latter benefit by finding safer homes, functioning infrastructure, jobs, education, basic freedoms, and other advantages, while the city benefits by maturing into the most linguistically and culturally diverse city in the history of the world. The linguistic diversity among today’s immigrants is of a different order of magnitude, compared to previous waves, but the tremendous benefits this brings to the city are still largely unrealized.
City government promises “language access”, in any case patchy at best, for speakers of just the ten largest languages. Well-intentioned city agencies like the Department of Education or the Department of Health are just starting to recognize how little they know about the languages spoken by tens of thousands of New Yorkers they serve. Ordinary New Yorkers are aware in theory of the city’s diversity, but not of its extraordinary scope, nor of the presence of so many threatened languages.
Hence the Languages of New York map and the work of the Endangered Language Alliance — to make the city’s linguistic diversity visible and audible. What the map reveals is not an unworkable Babel, but intricate, structured patterns of settlement, coexistence, and communication. Smaller linguistic communities nest within larger ones, based on a common lingua franca. Whole language families and dialect continua, far apart in the homeland, cluster close together here. New hybrids develop, language mixing is pervasive, and emergent linguistic phenomena are still barely studied, let alone accounted or provided for.
Names like Spanglish, Runglish, Yeshivish, the shifting spectrum of New York “Italian”, the Caribbean English Creole continuum of Flatbush Avenue, the “half-goat half-sheep” Ramaluk of Himalayan Queens can only gesture at this linguistic fluidity. Each one reflects a complex social reality native to the city and barely fathomed by those who aren’t in it. Most of the newest New Yorkers speak three, four, five languages, or more. By listening to all the languages, we honor the complexity of our city — and prepare to mobilize it.