Language City: The Fight To Preserve Endangered (Jewish) Mother Tongues

Contemporary cities are the most linguistically diverse in history, even as half of the world’s 7000-plus languages are endangered. Ross Perlin, author of the new book Language City and co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, will describe the race to document and support little-known languages, with a focus on endangered Jewish linguistic diversity, which in many ways is characteristically urban. Beyond Hebrew, Yiddish, and Ladino there are over a dozen distinct language varieties still vanishingly spoken by Jewish diaspora communities from Morocco to Uzbekistan, of which few are well documented. Drawing on work especially from in and around Brooklyn's Ocean Parkway, the most Jewish street in the world outside Israel, we will look both at what Jewish languages share and how they diverge within the larger story of Jewish history and the framework of global linguistic diversity.

Ross Perlin, PhD is a linguist, writer, and translator focused on exploring and supporting linguistic diversity. His book Language City was just released by Grove in the US and the UK. Since 2013 he has been Co-Director of the Endangered Language Alliance in New York, where he created the Jewish Languages Project. He also teaches linguistics at Columbia. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Harper’s, and elsewhere, and his first book Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy ignited a national conversation about unpaid work. He has an MA in Language Documentation and Description from SOAS and a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Bern.