Take a few minutes of your Friday to fall deep down the rabbit hole of New York City's jaw-dropping linguistic diversity.
This interactive map is the product of more than a decade of research from the Endangered Language Alliance, a group that seeks to document and preserve smaller, minority, and Indigenous languages across New York City.
Each of the 1,200 dots on the map either reflect a conversation with someone knowledgeable about one of the more than 700 existing languages spoken, or a historical data point that delves into the linguistic history of a part of the New York region. Every dot comes with heaps of context, and in some cases, video of native speakers.
So you might listen to a man in deep eastern Queens tell a story about his childhood in his native Amuzgo (also called Nomndaa, spoken around Oaxaca, Mexico), or read about how 3,000 German refugees speaking Palatine German were stranded on Governors Island in 1710 (among their numbers: John Peter Zenger).
Hitting the "data" tab, you can choose a head-spinning number of filters, including video.
"In a lot of cases people who saw the map that we put out in 2019, contacted us and said, hey I'm actually a speaker of such and such language, I didn't see my language on the map, we have a small community here," said Ross Perlin, ELA's co-director.
Perlin said that part of the ELA's mission is to record the many languages that are left out of the U.S. Census (which are denoted by the green polygon layers in the Census tab).
"A speaker of Chuj, a Mayan language, contacted us because they had seen the map that had come out. He lives in the Bronx, he does telephone interpretation, Spanish-Chuj interpretation for Chuj speakers in other parts of the country," Perlin said. "He actually is not sure that there is a wider Chuj community in New York, there very well may be. He's just come here and is doing this work."
In an interview with the New York Times upon his retirement earlier this month, the city's chief demographer, Joseph Salvo, said that his top concern was a decline in the number of immigrants moving to the city since 2016. After enduring the Trump administration's anti-immigration policies, the pandemic also hit immigrant communities especially hard.
"Our growth is going to depend on giving support to these immigrants, many of whom suffered and lost family members," Salvo said.
Perlin told Gothamist that ELA's work aims to help in that endeavor.
"We hope that this map and this portrait of linguistic diversity will enable New York to recognize its role as the global leader in terms of human cultural and linguistic diversity. That is our greatest and deepest asset," Perlin said. "But we can't take it for granted, we have to support it, recognize it, nurture it, or we'll lose it."
