BABEL IN REVERSE
by Ross Perlin

New York, like so many immigrant cities, is powered by everyday transnationalism — the deep and continuing connections between so many individual New Yorkers and their neighborhoods with their places of origin on the other side of the world. Watching fiercely competitive Chinese volleyball on a Sunday summer afternoon in Brooklyn’s Leif Erickson Park — women in straw hats turning the paper scores by hand, ads in Chinese from local businesses and real estate agents strung up along the fence for the duration of the games — it matters whether you root for Hainan or Taishan, which are not just different teams and places, but identities, languages, and histories. The city’s Cosmopolitan Soccer League has squads with Norwegian, Tibetan, Afghan, Guyanese, and a dozens of other affiliations, but the smaller teams in less formal leagues often namecheck down to the region or town. Since 9/11, the NYPD has kept tabs on translocal New York with its own little translocal empire, posting intelligence officers to 16 different cities around the world, from Santo Domingo to Singapore.

Today’s city is ever more a microcosm of the world in all its linguistic diversity, yet still a very particular one. It was the Hart-Celler Immigration Act of 1965 that decidedly reopened New York to the world after four decades of relative closure. The Act capped a liberal movement against nativism and racism that helped bring JFK, a descendant of Irish immigrants and the first Catholic president who wrote A Nation of Immigrants, into the White House. At a unique moment of economic prosperity, Civil Rights momentum, and Cold War pressure, the Act passed a heavily Democratic Congress and was signed into law by LBJ on an Ellis Island just recently superceded by an airport in eastern Queens named for JFK.

The law went into effect as a new era of global mobility was beginning. What was true earlier of European New York — the presence not only of all major national languages but also, in fact disproportionately, of many linguistic minorities — now became true for Latin American New York, Asian New York, Caribbean New York, and African New York. The Act ended racist national origins quotas that had aimed to freeze the country’s ethnic proportions, putting every country on a more equal footing — including those in the Western Hemisphere, which lost a special exemption — while emphasizing family reunification and occupational skills. Later legislation (the Refugee Act of 1980, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, the Immigration Act of 1990) would impact the city and modify Hart-Celler without fundamentally altering its terms.

Though after 1965 there was an initial influx from southern European countries like Greece and Portugal, the most immediate and substantial impact would be in terms of Asian immigration.

Manhattan’s Taishanese- and Cantonese-dominated Chinatown would ultimately give way to a dozen different Chinatowns across the five boroughs, transforming New York into by far the most populous Chinese city outside of Asia. Immigrants from Hong Kong and Taiwan, with many of the latter middle-class, Mandarin-speaking professionals, pioneered the major new communities in Queens and Brooklyn.

A very different wave of working-class Fujianese speakers began to arrive in the 1980s and 90s, mostly from in and around the city of Fuzhou. Then came the Wenzhounese from China’s Zhejiang Province, who speak their own highly distinctive Chinese language. But the largest number have been speakers of Mandarin, or else those shifting towards it, although nearly major Chinese language and dialect may now be present in the city. So-called “dialects” like Hakka, Hainanese, or Hunanese, in fact highly distinctive and mutually unintelligible, face the same pressures in New York that they do in China, not to mention the local varieties of particular towns and counties.

On a much smaller scale, Korean and Japanese have also grown exponentially in the city since 1965, but so has immigration from much more linguistically areas of southeast Asia, with Filipino communities, for instance, both uniting around Tagalog but also bringing a dozen different languages to every borough and beyond, though Woodside, Queens is a crucial hub. Neighboring Elmhurst, meanwhile, has become the place for the city’s fast-growing Thai, Burmese, and Indonesian communities, where not just the national standards but several dozen minority languages are actively spoken.

For speakers of Central Asian languages, the dynamics were very different, resulting in the new Silk Road that now runs across southern Brooklyn and part of Queens. The initial refugee and survivor communities of Turks, Tatars, and Uzbeks formed in the 1950s broadened to include Kazakhs, Azeris, Uighurs, and many others with the fall of the Soviet Union. As the hemisphere’s largest Russian-speaking nexus formed in and around Brighton Beach from a core of Soviet Jewish refugees, a whole post-Soviet world took shape in the surrounding neighborhoods, ultimately including people from the farthest eastern reaches of the Turkic world: speakers of languages like Chuvash, Tuvan, and Yakut from Siberia.

Iranic languages form Central Asia’s other major language family, with speakers of many having come to New York in multiple, partially overlapping waves. Substantial, separate communities speak forms of Persian, including Farsi from Iran, Dari and Hazara from Afghanistan, and Tajik from Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Besides the many secular and Muslim Iranians in the city, Jews in Brooklyn and especially Great Neck constitute the largest organized Iranian community. They include speakers not only of Persian but of the quite different Judeo-Iranic languages of Shiraz, Isfashan, Kashan, and other Iranian cities. Related but quite different are the “mountain Jews” of Azerbaijan and Daghestan, who speak the Iranic language Juhuri and have their local hub in central Brooklyn.

Tens of thousands of Bukharian Jews from Uzbekistan, speaking Bukhori (also known as Judeo-Tajik), have established their major center in Rego Park and Forest Hills in eastern Queens. A small Kurdish community, speaking Kurmanji, Zaza, Sorani, and perhaps other languages, is continually growing. Several hundred Pamiris from eastern Tajikistan have arrived especially within the last decade, speaking Shughni, Rushani, Bartangi, Ishkashimi, and Wakhi, with a related variety of the latter also spoken by several families in Brooklyn but originally from the Pakistani side of the border.

The famous Little Syria established around Washington Street in lower Manhattan in the late 19th century was no more by the 1950s — ended both by the construction of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel and a broader community movement to Brooklyn, first in and around Atlantic Avenue and later down to Bay Ridge.

After 1965, New York became home not only to this community’s form of Levantine Arabic but to nearly every form of Arabic used by Muslims, Christians, and Jews from West Africa to Iraq. Today Yemeni and Moroccan New Yorkers are neighbors in the Bronx, and Sudanese and Mauritanian New Yorkers encounter each other in Brooklyn, while Bengali- and Fulani-speaking Muslims in Queens might find themselves worshipping in liturgical Arabic in the same mosque.

How the city’s extraordinary Arabic diveristy is actually navigated, given how different these “dialects” are from one another, is little understood, though the lingua francas of Modern Standard Arabic and Egyptian Arabic, widely known through music, movies, and television, certainly play a role. While some mosques are associated with particular linguistic groups, others are among the city’s most multilingual spaces, with congregants who speak dozens of languages, including minority languages of North Africa like the half-dozen Amazigh (Berber) languages that are spoken along Steinway Street in Queens.

Inversely, the city is home to religious minorities of the Middle East who may speak Arabic day to day but worship in other languages — like Coptic, the liturgical language of Egyptian Christians and descendant of the language of the pharaohs, at numerous churches in Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, Jersey City and elsewhere. Likewise, Brooklyn is home to the world’s largest “Syrian” Jewish community (which includes Jews with Lebanese and Egyptian backgrounds), where traces of a distinctively Jewish form of Levantine Arabic are retained. Moroccan Jews also have several synagogues in the city and may distinguish their Moroccan Judeo-Arabic (from places like Fez and Marrakesh) as il-’arbiyya dyalna, our Arabic, in contrast to il-’arbiyya dil-msilmin, the Arabic of Muslim Moroccans. Yemeni Jews, with communities around the city, show a similar pattern not only with their own Judeo-Arabic, but a distinctive liturgical Hebrew. At Iraqi Jewish synagogues in Jamaica Estates and Great Neck, some still remember endangered Baghdadi Judeo-Arabaic, also known as haki mal yihud, the speech of the Jews. All forms of Judeo-Arabic today are highly endangered.

Before the spread of Arabic due to Islam, Aramaic was the dominant lingua franca of the Middle East. Today the many branches of Neo-Aramaic, all endangered, are primarily associated with embattled Christian and Jewish communities, but several very different varieties retain a presence in New York. Mostly widely known, among observant Jews, is the Jewish Babylonian Aramaic learned to read key texts, including the Talmud. Among both Levantine and South Indian Christians, Syriac, another Aramaic descendant, is prayed and chanted at a dozen churches across the city.

Another religious community, the Mandeans of Iraq and Iran, have some 300 people in Queens and Long Island, who still worship and even partially speak their Mandaic forms of what is ultimately also a form of Neo-Aramaic. Likewise the community of around 200 families from ‘Ayn Wardo in Turkey’s Southeast Tur Abdin region, who are in and around Haworth, New Jersey; recent Chaldean refugees coming to Brooklyn from the Plain of Mosul and Iraqi Kurdistan now; Assyrians in Yonkers; and a handful of older Iranian Jews in Great Neck from towns like Bijar and Urmia.

The city’s most widely spoken South Asian languages are Bengali and Urdu, with growing neighborhoods of speakers in every borough and beyond. In addition, most of Bangladesh’s linguistic and religious minorities are now at least somewhat present as well, especially in Queens: the Bangladeshi Hindus speaking Bishnupriya Mainpuri and Meitei; a few dozen Garo speakers from near Tibet; and even small Buddhist communities from the country’s Chittagong Hill Tracts speaking five different endangered languages. Larger regional languages closely related to but distinct from Bengali are also strongly present — particularly Sylheti from the country’s northeast but also Chittagonian, Noakhali, and Sandwippa.

Along Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn is the city’s most diverse Pakistani zone, where not only Urdu and Punjabi are widely spoken, but some know Pashto, Sindhi, Saraiki, and Pothwari, as well as a some of the endangered languages of Pakistan’s mountainous north (Balti, Burushaski, Kalasha, Khowar, Shina, Wakhi).

Central Brooklyn was also the initial point of settlement for a community of Nepalis, Tibetans, and other Himalayans, although ultimately more have settled in Queens, particularly in and around the South Asian microcosm of Jackson Heights. Here language mixing and multilingualism are pervasive, but dozens of different native languages are also still in evidence — from the large groups proudly trying to maintain Sherpa, Newar, and various forms of Tibetan from Kham and Amdo to very small communities from particular Himalayan valleys using languages like Limi and Nubri.

Hindi speakers, though numerous across the city, are an even more substantial presence in New Jersey and Long Island suburbs, and there are dozens of other Indian languages as well, especially in a place like Edison. Separate and substantial are the clusters of mostly Sikh Punjabi speakers in Ozone Park/Richmond Hill, the Malayalam-speaking Christians in Bellerose/Floral Park, and the Tamil speakers in neighboring areas. Gujarati remains integral to Jersey City, and the number of Telugu speakers is growing quickly. Staten Island is thought to be home to the largest Sri Lankan community outside of Sri Lanka: several thousand people speaking both Sinhalese and Tamil. Major Indo-Caribbean communities, particularly from Guyana and Trinidad and anchored in Queens, carry both a South Indian and Caribbean creole linguistic heritage.

Perhaps the most recent and extraordinary migration to transform the city’s linguistic landscape has been the large-scale arrival of African languages since the 1970s. The vast majority of African New Yorkers come from West Africa, speaking over a hundred languages from the region, although there are also dozens of language communities from all corners of the continent. The Black diaspora capital of Harlem provided an initial gateway, but today the Bronx is the epicenter.

Yet African languages remain underrecognized, with colonial languages or variations on them continuing to play a dominant role both in the region and in the New York communities. French remains a vitally important intergroup language for many from Senegal, Guinea, Mali, and elsewhere, and there is widespread knowledge of Arabic for religious purposes. The persistence of colonial borders in today’s nation states obscure the complex cross-border groupings which constitute the deeper underpinnings of African New York — whether it’s the widely spoken Manding languages (Bambara, Maninka, Mandinka, Dioula, and others) or the Fulani grouping, also known as Pulaar or Fulfulde and spoken all the way east to the Red Sea.

African New Yorkers from British-colonized areas are more likely to be shifting to English, or else forms like Ghanaian English, Nigerian English, Liberian English, or Sierra Leone’s Krio. So sizeable is the city’s Ghanaian community now, anchored in the Bronx, that every Ghanaian language is now spoken to some degree, though the national language Twi sees the widest use. Among Nigerian New Yorkers, Yoruba and Igbo speakers appear to constitute the majority, but there are also many Hausa and Edo speakers, as well as clusters speaking Afenmai, Anaang, Efik, Esan, Ibibio, Kalabari, Tiv, and Urhobo varieties. Staten Island’s Little Liberia, a vital refuge during the years of civil war, is home to speakers of all of the country’s seventeen official languages.

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©2022 Text by Ross Perlin