54 | What’s All Around Us - Episode Transcript
Brooklyn, USA | February 9, 2022

[INTRO]
[MUSIC BED: Alsarah & The Nubatones live performance on B-Side, produced by BRIC TV]

Khyriel Palmer: You’re listening to the Brooklyn, USA podcast – an occasional audio love letter from Brooklyn to the world. And with speakers of approximately 10% of the world’s languages living right here in Brooklyn, we are the world.

Khyriel Palmer: This season on the podcast, we’re looking at how Brooklyn builds community through language, and why linguistic diversity is so precious for our world, our city, and ourselves. [FADE MUSIC]

[MUSIC BED: Arooj Aftab live performance on B-Side, produced by BRIC TV]

Khyriel Palmer: In 2019, the Endangered Language Alliance – a New York City-based nonprofit with a mission to document and support endangered languages – released its first-ever interactive language map of New York City drawn from a decade of research, and documenting over 700 language varieties at over 1200 significant sites. For the first episode of our language season, we met up with ELA co-director Ross Perlin to get an overview of Brooklyn’s linguistic history.

Khyriel Palmer: Here’s Ross…

[FADE MUSIC]

[ELA INTERVIEW]
[MUSIC BED: Lenape Hymn “Wëntaxa Kishelëmiàn” sung by Cornelius Wilson]

Ross Perlin (RP): New York is not only the most linguistically diverse place in the world from what is known, but maybe the most linguistically diverse place that there has been in the world up to this point.

RP: The question is, will that remain the case, because New York is the recipient of all of this amazing linguistic diversity, but how much of it can survive here and how much are we doing to support it and to maintain and develop it? [END MUSIC]

RP: My name is Ross Perlin, I'm co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance. I'm a linguist, writer, translator based here in New York.

[CLIP from 112BK]
[News sting sound] Brian Vines: New York City is arguably the most diverse city in the world! But don’t take it from me, take it from our next guest who’s made it his job to map the city’s languages including ones that are highly endangered – What does that mean?

[CLIP from “Voices of the Himalaya”]
[FADE UP MUSIC: String instrument, singing]

RP: The Endangered Language Alliance was founded in 2010. We're a small nonprofit. Our work is all over the city, and in some cases all over the world, although the real focus has always been on New York as this capital of languages. We are kind of an extended family of linguists, artists, community language activists, regular New Yorkers from all over who care about linguistic diversity in New York and do a variety of projects documenting endangered languages, supporting language revitalization projects, mapping languages, we get involved sometimes with policy, education, hosting classes in languages, children's books, whatever projects people want to work on to support linguistic diversity.

[CLIP from “Voices of the Himalaya”]
Narrator:[FADE OUT MUSIC] Culture and language activist Nawang Gurung has become a custodian of Mustang. Together with the Endangered Language Alliance here in New York, he is working to create a kind of Mustang Library of Congress – a digital archive that will preserve oral history, folklore, and song handed down over hundreds of years.

Nawang Gurung: There are so many voices that are never heard in New York City. When I conceived of the “Voices of the Himalayas” project, I wanted to record those voices and give them a platform.

RP: Our work at the Endangered Language Alliance has shown that there are 700 to 800 languages that are spoken in the metropolitan area. You know, the question of what's defined as a language, what’s defined as a dialect — this gets very complicated.

[CLIP from 112BK]
Brian Vines: So nerd out with me for a second, what is the difference between a dialect and a language?

RP: I think my favorite, sort of the classic quote about this is that “language is a dialect with an army and a navy.” [laughter] basically the idea is that it’s about political power. For linguists, we talk about mutual intelligibility. Whether two people speaking, you know, the way they speak, how much they can understand each other.

RP: What our mapping efforts have shown, and this has been all released now at Language Map dot NYC, our new digital language map, is that more than 10% of the world's linguistic diversity, at least, is here. It's really four to five times the number that the census shows. The census is really inadequate when it comes to language. That's why we have done this project to really map the languages of New York.

[CLIP] Newscaster: Data from the 2020 census is finally out after being delayed by the pandemic and it shows the country is more racially and ethnically diverse now. The white nonhispanic population declined for the first time in the nation’s history, but remains the largest racial group. And overall, the US population grew just over 7%.

RP: In some ways, it's been the opposite of a census because we kind of started from the realization of all that the census was missing. ELA alone has been making recordings in over 100 languages over the course of its existence, and almost none of them are represented on the census. So we immediately knew that there were all of these languages that were not in there. That includes, you know, larger languages as well as smaller. But most of these languages we're talking about people will have not heard of. They’re primarily aural, indigenous, minority languages, which do not have official support, in some cases, are not well-documented in terms of dictionaries, recordings, any of that material. And that has really been our focus as an organization.

[MUSIC BED: Tibetan singer Mimi Palma singing “Lovers Under the Moonlight”]

RP: The way that we gathered the data who worked on this was ultimately thousands of conversations. The map is built around the idea of significant sites. Places like community centers or religious institutions or restaurants or parks or hometown associations are really important. People won't immediately say necessarily what language they speak if it's a less commonly known language, and they don't think anybody will know about it. They'll mention the larger language that they think people will know. So they'll say, “Oh yeah, yeah, of course I speak Nepali. Nepali is my language”, and then you say, “Oh, where are you from?” And they'll say, “Oh, I'm from Limi.” If you know the region, you know “Oh, well Limi is right up on the border with Tibet, and you know, the language is quite different from Nepali.” And then you talk to them and you know, “yeah, actually, yeah, we speak, we speak, Limi. That's really the mother tongue and Nepali came later.” So it's in kind of knowing how to ask and having those conversations over time.

[CLIPS from ELA poetry reading collaged and layered. In order: Kuranko, Occitan, Tlapanec, Welsh, Totonac, English] English speaker: “My father, he got it from his father, he got it from grandfather, all the way back.”

[MUSIC ends]

RP: There are different ways of talking about endangerment, and there's endangerment on the global level versus endangerment at the local, New York level. I think at the local level, actually there's even heavier endangerment because it's just very difficult in New York City or in really any kind of immigrant diaspora context to pass on the language to the next generation if it's not a larger language. There are some rare and interesting cases. I mean, one of the notable cases in Brooklyn has become Yiddish in the Hasidic community which now has cases of fourth generation transmission in Brooklyn. But that's very unusual and obviously is tied to the particular circumstances in that community. [CLIP of Yiddish singing]

RP: Endangerment at the local level in New York is heavy. In terms of how many of these languages that are spoken in Brooklyn are considered endangered at a global level… it might be something like half? Which is kind of around the number that a lot of linguists say, of the world's 7000 languages, up to half are often considered endangered just based on the two basic criteria of endangerment: intergenerational transmission – is it being passed on to children? And then, number of speakers. There are languages in New York, their languages in Brooklyn, which globally have fewer than a thousand speakers.

[MUSIC BED: Garifuna Speaker James Lovell sings “Walamiseru” or “Our Sad Experience”]

RP: Why are half of the world's languages now endangered? Why is this a global phenomenon now that seems to be accelerating? That is tied to kind of global historical reasons and it's and it's a thing that I think can be traced back at a macro level, you know, several centuries to colonialism. And now more recently in the 20th century, to the rise of nation states that are promoting individual national languages at the expense of minority languages and the spread of capital and a kind of globalized economy where certain languages are privileged and people are drawn into these flows. But it's important to add that, despite this discussion of global language endangerment and all of these forces, that we are also in a sort of the new and kind of amazing period of language revitalization.

RP: Native American languages, many of which, you know, have been just under attack from English and the pressure to learn English and all of the forces that have gone into, you know, expulsion and dispossession of Native American communities. I mean, hundreds of languages that were spoken here and sort of little recognized and demeaned in every way by settlers. But now challenging as it is, there are, I mean, globally, hundreds of language revitalization programs.

[CLIP] Newscast 1: UNESCO declared 21st February International Mother Language Day in 1999. The day also honors the Bangladeshi's fight for recognition for the Bangla language. 21ST February is the anniversary of the movement to protect their cultural roots through their mother language. One of the very rare incidents in history where people sacrificed their lives for their mother tongue.

RP: When there’s, political sovereignty can be achieved, like in the case of the independence of Bangladesh, then you can really put a whole state behind the language revitalization. Places like Catalonia and Spain as well, or Basque Country have been able to, partly by gaining more political autonomy, also bolster their languages.

[CLIP] Newscast 2: Thousands have gathered for peaceful demonstrations in the center of Barcelona. The reason? A court decision that mandates 25% of all school subjects be taught in Spanish. The region of Catalonia has its own language called Catalan.

RP: Having sovereignty and having resources and being organized as a, as a group can allow a community to sort of assert their language. [FADE OUT MUSIC]

[MUSIC BED: Lenape Hymn “Kishelmukonk Os'hakame” sung by Cornelius Wilson]

RP: The term Lenape, sometimes the term Munsee is used as the variety of Lenape, but that would have been what was spoken in Brooklyn before the early 17th century and colonization. Brooklyn was also the place where enslaved Africans were sort of most prominent and were, were brought in the largest numbers. So, there would have been African languages.

RP: Dutch would have been this important language across Brooklyn, maybe even into the early 19th century on the large Dutch family farms that were worked by many enslaved Africans, who also then would have been pressured to speak Dutch. [END MUSIC]

[MUSIC BED: Fabienne Geffroy singing in Celtic language]

RP: In terms of the major thing that then happens is, you know, the development of Brooklyn after the Civil War, when it just grew by leaps and bounds and began to have a huge, mostly European immigrant population. And so it became a very important place for the Irish language, which is a highly endangered language. Brooklyn was actually the site of the founding of the first Irish language periodical in the world. So there was a period that was heavily Irish, heavily German. [FADE OUT MUSIC]

[CLIP: Spoken Sicilian] RP: And then of course, these next kind of big waves were Italian and Jewish heavily. The Italians were actually, for the most part, you know, southern Italians who spoke often highly local varieties of Sicilian, of what's called Neapolitan, and of Calabrese. And then in terms of that, large Jewish communities that began to come in [CLIP: Spoken Ladino] Yiddish was the most significant, but you also saw the development of Ladino speaking communities and also some much smaller and, you know, now heavily endangered Jewish languages like Judeo Crimean Tatar.

RP: By the late 19th early 20th century. Brooklyn is this kind of hub of especially European immigrant linguistic diversity. [Radio Tuning] After World War Two especially, you begin to see this incredible Caribbean language diversity and incredible variety of Spanishes [CLIP: Spoken Spanish] that come into Brooklyn from all over the Spanish speaking world. And then just about every kind of Creole [CLIP: Spoken Creole][CLIP: Spoken Tokpisin] Haitian Creole, which you know, derives from French but is its own language. And then the range of English-based Creole from every island in the Caribbean that come to Brooklyn.

RP: You know, and I'm not even talking about the varieties of English, every variety of English, especially African-American English, but also, you know, [CLIP: Spoken Gullah] Gullah at one point, clearly and maybe still today, a language brought by African-Americans to Brooklyn as well as to Harlem.

[CLIP: Old Newscast] [MUSIC: Gentle flute] Narrator: It began in 1965, when congress abolished a policy excluding oriental immigration.

[CLIP: Lyndon B. Johnson’s Remarks on Signing the Immigration Act of 1965] Lyndon B. Johnson: This bill says simply that from this day forth those wishing to immigrate to America shall be admitted based on their skills a;nd to their relationships to those already here.

RP: Then, after 1965, as immigration really opens up again, you see this deep diversification areas like, you know, Brighton Beach [FADE UP Brighton Beach ambi] and Bensonhurst, which come to have people from the whole former Soviet Union, including, you know, the largest Central Asian population in the western hemisphere. People from, you know, across South Asia coming into areas like Kensington and you begin to see African language diversity as well. [FADE OUT Brighton Beach ambi]

[FADE UP Bay Ridge ambi] RP: Arabic begins to come to Brooklyn already in the late 19th century. You know, it's in the area first of what's now kind of Brooklyn Heights, downtown Brooklyn, Boerum Hill. But then that community largely begins to move down to Bay Ridge. Bay Ridge becomes, you know, one of the great kind of Arabic speaking centers – large numbers of Yemeni Arabic speakers and Iraqi Arabic and some North African Arabic. And likewise for Chinese Brooklyn and Fujianese, and Cantonese. Chinatown in Manhattan is there from the mid late 19th century, but in terms of Chinese Sunset Park, and then later Chinese Bensonhurst, and this whole kind of M train of Chinatowns, it's post ‘65, it’s even kind of later than that, mostly. And the Fujianese presence in particular, really as a strong force, dates from the 90s. [FADE OUT Bay Ridge ambi]

[CLIP: Ambi from Alberto Rivera’s dance at ELA's closing reception on Governors Island] Ross Perlin: Now performing “The Dance of the Deer” Alberto Rivera. [MUSIC: Drum, maracas, singing]

RP: The exhibits we had at Governors Island were sort of about allowing people to actually meet individual speakers of these languages because we can talk, you know, in these large generalizations about, “oh then a large number of Fujianese speakers came, and large number of Yemeni Arabic speakers came”, and it's difficult to to process. These are, these are big stories.

RP: So one of the exhibits was called Mother Tongues by a photographer named Yuri Marder, who's been working for years to take these huge, full, beautiful portrait photos of speakers that we work with from around the world in their spaces and with a line written line of their mother tongue that they've chosen kind of across the photo. And it really just kind of like brings you into their world in a very visual way.

RP: There are so many amazing stories of people from all over the world who've come here and their languages. One of the large portraits was of Garifuna Speaker James Lovell, who spent much of his life in Brooklyn and is originally from Belize. [FADE OUT Governor’s Island ambi]

[CLIP from Garifuna Nursery Rhymes Project]
James Lovell: So there it goes… [sounds of James Lovell teaching a Garifuna call-and-response song to a classroom of students.]

RP: Just the story of Garifuna is an amazing story. I mean, this is a language which is really the largest remaining kind of indigenous Caribbean language. It's an Arawakan language, on that base, many Arawakan languages are gone because of colonialism in the Caribbean. The people who speak it, you know, these were people being brought from Africa to be slaves who managed to escape onto the island of St. Vincent in the Caribbean, form their own society, along with indigenous Arawakan, Caribbean people. And then again were expelled like a century or more later by the British, and had to come to Central America, to the coast, to Belize and Honduras and Guatemala. And recreated another society there on the coast. Many became involved in seafaring and doing things on the water. And that's how many came to New York. And a large community formed here in the 20th century. And this incredible Afro-Indigenous, multilingual, multicultural world is now as much in New York as it is almost anywhere. And, you know, Brooklyn in the Bronx in particular.

RP: I mean, that story and the fact that that community is here, I think, is just an example of what's all around us. And honestly, you know, the things that people have gone through to preserve the, the Garifuna language and to keep it going. And it's an ongoing project, but I think an amazing one. [FADE OUT call-and-response song in Garifuna]

[CLIP from Wordpath Episode 43]
Leonard Thompson: I’m going to say a short prayer in the Delaware language about the Delawares and the people here, just so we can regain the Delaware language. I will speak first in the language of the Delaware tribe. And the old Delawares when they first prayer especially in the old big house, held up a right hand. [Prayer in Delaware language]

RP: What you lose with the loss of language diversity and of every individual language is substantial in so many ways: its knowledge about history, it’s knowledge about migrations, it's cultural knowledge, it's oral literature, it's verbal art, it's ecological knowledge about places, it's knowledge about traditions. And it's linguistic knowledge, certainly. I mean, from a linguistic point of view, each of these languages is one of the great, you know, natural experiments in communication and has unique features that no other language has. Just because a language is bigger, has more speakers now doesn't mean that it tells us more about what language is like, actually. On the contrary, it's often smaller languages which preserve more or tell us more about the human faculty for language. You know, this is the basis of linguistics and the basis of any kind of understanding about language.

[CLIP from Wordpath Episode 43]
Leonard Thompson: [end of prayer] And father, help us, give us wisdom so that we can remember these things pertaining to our language, and alsos sos we can keep this thing a-goin’

[MUSIC BED: Sonam Lhamo sings a song from Kham, historical eastern Tibet about nomadic life]

RP: But I think just equally with all of the questions about knowledge and, you know, artistic and scientific and all of that, it's also about justice as well. Most languages are being spoken and being maintained and representing worlds that have been under threat from larger groups – peoples who are under pressure, peoples who are on the margin in different societies who have been pressured to give up their languages and their cultures and their backgrounds, and internalize that to the point of feeling shame and feeling that they speak somehow brokenly, or something is wrong. Which is just from a linguistic point of view, doesn't make any sense. There's no such thing as a broken native language. Languages are not dying natural deaths. It's really about power and justice.

RP: What's lost is also possibilities and ways of being in the world that are being cast out and are being told that this is wrong or inferior and so on, when actually, you know, this is a whole other way of being and there's a whole other set of ideas and concepts. You know, it's not that there isn't similarities or crossover between languages, of course there are, but each language expresses and contains the life of a people over time.

[FADE OUT MUSIC]

[VOICE MEMO]

[“Chëkënakwi, waha!” or “The Blackbird Song” sung and told by Nora Thompson Dean to Robert Adams in 1977]

[BEEP] [voicemail audio] Nora Thompson Dean: There’s a song that, that was said the blackbirds sing when they make raids on our fields, and the blackbirds sing this song…

[sung] NTD: Chëkënakwi, waha! [English: Oh, blackbird!]

[sung] NTD: Këmuthakènsu. [English: He is stealing.]

[sung] NTD: Chëkënakwi, waha! [English: Oh, blackbird!]

[sung] NTD: Nchitanamàlsi liluwànke! [English: [Now blackbird sings] I will feel strong all winter long!]

[sung] NTD: Chëkënakwi, waha! Këmuthakènsu. [English: Oh, blackbird! He is stealing from the garden.]

[sung] NTD: Nchitanamàlsi liluwànke! [English: [The blackbird sings] I will feel strong all winter long!]

[CREDITS]
[MUSIC BED: Jomion & The Uklos live performance on B-Side, produced by BRIC TV]

Khyriel Palmer: Brooklyn, USA is produced by me Khyriel Palmer,

Emily Boghossian: and me Emily Boghossian,

Shirin Barghi: and me Shirin Barghi,

Charlie Hoxie: and me Charlie Hoxie,

Mayumi Sato: and me Mayumi Sato,

Khyriel Palmer: with help this week from Ross Perlin, the Endangered Language Alliance, Curtis Zunigha, and the Lenape Talking Dictionary.

Khyriel Palmer: You can find Ross Perlin on social media [at] ross perlin. To learn more about the Endangered Language Alliance, visit elalliance.org. Explore ELA’s interactive language map at languagemap.nyc, and listen to more Lenape words, sentences, stories, grammar, songs, and lessons at talk-lenape.org. The Lenape Talking Dictionary is the intellectual property of the federally-recognized Delaware Tribe of Indians in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. The use of any written or audio material from this site shall require the advance-written permission of the Delaware Tribe of Indians.

Khyriel Palmer: If you want to tell us a story, or somehow end up on the podcast, check the show notes for a link to our guide on recording a voice memo on your mobile phone and sending it to us on the internet. And if you like what you hear or think we missed something, comment, like, share and subscribe, and follow at BRIC TV on twitter and instagram, for updates. For more information on this and all BRIC Radio podcasts, visit www.bricartsmedia.org/radio.

Khyriel Palmer: We are on the unceded territory of the Lenni Lenape, Canarsie, Shinecock, and Munsee people. We acknowledge the many Indigenous Nations with ties to this land and we recognize that the Lenape still call Manahatta home.

[FADE OUT MUSIC]

Google doc of transcript: https://bit.ly/3L9mMRO