Queens, a City of Tongues:
Language Revival
Losing a languages and perspective would be like not ever being able to experience the sound of a guitar.
A man named Tom Belt was an Oklahoma native who was one of the last speakers of a language. The language was Cherokee. Tom wasn’t exposed to the English language until he was in kindergarten. Twenty years later, he ended up in South Carolina and found and married a Cherokee woman. He realized that because she did not speak Cherokee, he had no one to talk to in his native language. This caused Tom to realize how languages can die out and how much he missed it once it was gone (Nuwer).
Shaka: the hand gesture of extending the pinkie and the thumb usually used to show Hawaiian spirit. Lugha Moja Haitoshi in Swahili means: “One language is never enough.” Imagine not being able to talk to anyone in your native language as Tom discovered. Of the seven thousand languages that are spoken around the world today, a lot of them are endangered. New York, more specifically Queens, is known for being one of the language capitals of the world. If the languages in Queens were extinct, the neighborhood would be an abandoned junkyard.(“What You Can Do to Help Preserve the World’s Endangered Languages”) It would be a shame if a culture were to lose its language because language holds people together. This is why people are taking steps to preserve different languages in places like Queens. People do this by recording and writing them down for people to learn, see, and acknowledge in the future. The reason why people take these actions is because languages should be preserved to keep available all perspectives about the world-- and life itself.
Scientists predict that ten percent of all languages will disappear within the century. Some scientists will go as far as saying that only five languages will be spoken. Only ninety-five
percent of the world speaks the 5500 (McWhorter). Those languages include Chinese, Spanish, English, Hindi, Arabic, and Portuguese. In the book Nonstop Metropolis, Suketu Mehta mentions that languages are like “wormholes”, meaning that that every single language could bring a person to a whole different cultural part of Queens or New York itself. The other five percent of the world’s population only speaks around seven languages. Different languages express a different way of thinking. In Mandarin people would not say “next week” or “last week”. They would either say the week above or the week below.(Roberts) This example shows that if a language is lost, more is in jeopardy than a way of communicating.
In order to preserve these languages people like Ross Perlin , a person that works for the ELA, are using voice recordings and writing them down so that people like us are able to read, acknowledge, and possibly learn them. 95% of the world’s 7 billion people only speak about 5 different languages now while the other 5% speak the 5,500(“The Fight to Save Endangered Languages”). This statistic shows that a minority of people speak the languages such as Hawaiian and the Otomanguean languages of Mexico. What Ross Perlin and the ELA do is try to get connections to the last speakers of a language and convince them to teach the language and keep the culture alive. In “Tower of Scrabble,” Suketu Mehta mentions how a person set up a conference online, and later on she knew that there were more speakers of that language left than they had thought in New York. Mehta tells a story about his son in his essay: “Tower of Scrabble” The story is about how he put his son into a school where he was not treated right. “He looks up at them hopefully, but they don’t invite him to play with them. When he eats his khichri in the little gardens downstairs, the girl across the hall says, “Eeeeuw.” This is colonialism. This is what it has done to me and to my son: it has rendered our language unspeakable,” (Mehta 195). The story later continues on how he puts his son in another school with a lot more diverse students. This allows Mehta and his son to be in a safe environment where they can learn and be in a safe space(Mehta).The teacher asked Mehta for a tape of a song that his son, Gautama, knew well. “So I make a tape, of a lullaby that I have been singing to Gautama almost every night: Lalla lalla lori Doodh ki katori Doodh me batasha Munna dekho tamasha. Gautama enters the new schoolroom, apprehensive, wondering if all these kids will talk to him, play with him” (195). After the teacher listened to the tape, she told the class to sing along with the song while she played the piano. This made Gautama believe that his language was now speakable again. The amazement in his eyes glistened as he heard a song that he was so familiar with. This gesture made the child want to learn English. The language barrier was broken. Suketu Mehta mentioned the Tower of Babel, which is a story in the first book in the Christian Bible and is used to explain why there are so many different languages. The people living in biblical times decided to build a building so tall that it could reach God himself. Because God did not want the people to attempt to reach Him, He scrambled all of the languages so that they could not understand each other.They all fled from the city/tower that they were building. This is where the word babble comes from. Some might say that even after God confused all the languages, the people somehow learned each other’s languages and came back together. This was the first time that the language barrier was broken.
Language gives people a new perspective on the world. Each language has specific and different meanings for each word or phrase. For example, in Chinese there aren’t as many ways to say things in a nice polite way. Everything would come out sounding insensitive. This is why research shows that Chinese people are most likely to be more insensitive towards others(McWhorter).Another reason why having languages are important is that every language is a whole different culture. The good thing about having diversity in languages is that if all the people in the world spoke just one language, there would be lots of problems. For example if a war is going on and everyone can hear each other there would be one thing taken off the advantage list.
Another reason that languages are so important is because each one represents how a culture perceives around them. For example, McWhorter write about how Russian speakers do not have a specific way to categorize the color blue because there is only one way to say it; but English speakers would specify the color blue because there are azure, royal blue, blue-green, and baby blue. (McWhorter) (Parallelism) In Russian these specifications do not exist. McWhorter goes on by saying that in Chinese there fewer ways of saying things in a more subtle way. Because of this, Chinese speakers are less sensitive to a lot of things that English speakers would try to avoid saying.(McWhorter) Losing a languages and perspective would be like not ever being able to experience the sound of a guitar. (Allusion)Music could be considered a language of its own. No band would be complete without a guitar. Just like our world would not be complete without its languages.(Intentional Fragment)
Languages are either lost by parents not being able to teach their kids the language, or that the parents believe that learning that language would be useless. Because of this thought process many languages suffer. Most of these languages consist of native languages such as Otomanguean dialects of Mexico and other indigenous languages of small islands and such. One example of the island language would be Hawaiian. This exotic language is endangered of no longer existing. Having just a few languages will be somewhat productive but in the end it just +makes all the people on earth alike. Some languages that are going extinct in New York would be Judeo-Kashani, Himalayan Languages, and Gottscheerisch, a Germanic language from Slovenia. Ross Perlin, a cofounder of the Endangered Language Alliance, mentioned,”Language is like a bellwether. It’s hard to maintain the full richness, depth and complexity of a culture without its languages”(Roberts). This means that although different ethnicities may exist, without languages the ethnicity would mean little to nothing.
According to Sam Roberts, a writer at the New York Times, normal people who are living everyday lives, can help save the endangered languages of the world. Roberts said that in order for us to save languages, we must “Encourage their families -- grandparents etc -- to pass on the elements of the language and try to find whatever remnants, written or oral, still exist before they are lost forever”(Roberts). According to Matador Network, another way to save languages is to learn one of them. Along with one of the large languages such as Chinese or Spanish, learn some languages such as Swahili or Hawaiian(“What You Can Do to Help Preserve the World’s Endangered Languages”). This way people can learn what might be lost forever. One last way that a person can help save languages would be working with the Endangered Language or donate to the organization. People at these kinds of organizations are doing everything they can to preserve as many languages as possible. There are schools that use voice recordings so that people would know how to pronounce certain words and type of stuff like that. If schools all around the world are doing this, a language would never be lost again. The different perspectives of the world will stay intact and all cultures will remain the way they are right now if not bigger in the future.
I wrote about languages because in my opinion languages are an important to the way people view the world. Language is something that either brings people together or tears them apart. In the end, the main point is that languages are an important thing the world. It brings people together. It tears them apart. It starts something inside of people that allows people to communicate have a good time doing it. Because of languages, there is some diversity among people. People aren’t some mindless robots that roam the streets of New York everyday. The people who are keeping languages alive in New York and the world are trying the best they can to prevent people from becoming these mindless creatures that just work and sleep. In doing so, that puts their time and effort into keeping New York a diverse place, are doing it so they won’t become mindless themselves. The people who work at the Endangered Language Alliance speak either 3 or 4 languages. Because people realize what could be lost if a language is forgotten, linguists like Ross Perlin learn them(Left Branching). Mehta knows what it is like to want to learn a new language because of his son. Sam Roberts knows about what goes away because of all the research he did to write that amazing article. Ordinary people like us are able to learn languages in such educated places. People can learn languages such as Swahili, Cherokee, or some other endangered language. New York is a melting pot, and the different languages that are spoken should be valued so that people can keep it that way.
Shaka: the hand gesture of extending the pinkie and the thumb usually used to show Hawaiian spirit. Lugha Moja Haitoshi in Swahili means: “One language is never enough.” Imagine not being able to talk to anyone in your native language as Tom discovered. Of the seven thousand languages that are spoken around the world today, a lot of them are endangered. New York, more specifically Queens, is known for being one of the language capitals of the world. If the languages in Queens were extinct, the neighborhood would be an abandoned junkyard.(“What You Can Do to Help Preserve the World’s Endangered Languages”) It would be a shame if a culture were to lose its language because language holds people together. This is why people are taking steps to preserve different languages in places like Queens. People do this by recording and writing them down for people to learn, see, and acknowledge in the future. The reason why people take these actions is because languages should be preserved to keep available all perspectives about the world-- and life itself.
Scientists predict that ten percent of all languages will disappear within the century. Some scientists will go as far as saying that only five languages will be spoken. Only ninety-five
percent of the world speaks the 5500 (McWhorter). Those languages include Chinese, Spanish, English, Hindi, Arabic, and Portuguese. In the book Nonstop Metropolis, Suketu Mehta mentions that languages are like “wormholes”, meaning that that every single language could bring a person to a whole different cultural part of Queens or New York itself. The other five percent of the world’s population only speaks around seven languages. Different languages express a different way of thinking. In Mandarin people would not say “next week” or “last week”. They would either say the week above or the week below.(Roberts) This example shows that if a language is lost, more is in jeopardy than a way of communicating.
In order to preserve these languages people like Ross Perlin , a person that works for the ELA, are using voice recordings and writing them down so that people like us are able to read, acknowledge, and possibly learn them. 95% of the world’s 7 billion people only speak about 5 different languages now while the other 5% speak the 5,500(“The Fight to Save Endangered Languages”). This statistic shows that a minority of people speak the languages such as Hawaiian and the Otomanguean languages of Mexico. What Ross Perlin and the ELA do is try to get connections to the last speakers of a language and convince them to teach the language and keep the culture alive. In “Tower of Scrabble,” Suketu Mehta mentions how a person set up a conference online, and later on she knew that there were more speakers of that language left than they had thought in New York. Mehta tells a story about his son in his essay: “Tower of Scrabble” The story is about how he put his son into a school where he was not treated right. “He looks up at them hopefully, but they don’t invite him to play with them. When he eats his khichri in the little gardens downstairs, the girl across the hall says, “Eeeeuw.” This is colonialism. This is what it has done to me and to my son: it has rendered our language unspeakable,” (Mehta 195). The story later continues on how he puts his son in another school with a lot more diverse students. This allows Mehta and his son to be in a safe environment where they can learn and be in a safe space(Mehta).The teacher asked Mehta for a tape of a song that his son, Gautama, knew well. “So I make a tape, of a lullaby that I have been singing to Gautama almost every night: Lalla lalla lori Doodh ki katori Doodh me batasha Munna dekho tamasha. Gautama enters the new schoolroom, apprehensive, wondering if all these kids will talk to him, play with him” (195). After the teacher listened to the tape, she told the class to sing along with the song while she played the piano. This made Gautama believe that his language was now speakable again. The amazement in his eyes glistened as he heard a song that he was so familiar with. This gesture made the child want to learn English. The language barrier was broken. Suketu Mehta mentioned the Tower of Babel, which is a story in the first book in the Christian Bible and is used to explain why there are so many different languages. The people living in biblical times decided to build a building so tall that it could reach God himself. Because God did not want the people to attempt to reach Him, He scrambled all of the languages so that they could not understand each other.They all fled from the city/tower that they were building. This is where the word babble comes from. Some might say that even after God confused all the languages, the people somehow learned each other’s languages and came back together. This was the first time that the language barrier was broken.
Language gives people a new perspective on the world. Each language has specific and different meanings for each word or phrase. For example, in Chinese there aren’t as many ways to say things in a nice polite way. Everything would come out sounding insensitive. This is why research shows that Chinese people are most likely to be more insensitive towards others(McWhorter).Another reason why having languages are important is that every language is a whole different culture. The good thing about having diversity in languages is that if all the people in the world spoke just one language, there would be lots of problems. For example if a war is going on and everyone can hear each other there would be one thing taken off the advantage list.
Another reason that languages are so important is because each one represents how a culture perceives around them. For example, McWhorter write about how Russian speakers do not have a specific way to categorize the color blue because there is only one way to say it; but English speakers would specify the color blue because there are azure, royal blue, blue-green, and baby blue. (McWhorter) (Parallelism) In Russian these specifications do not exist. McWhorter goes on by saying that in Chinese there fewer ways of saying things in a more subtle way. Because of this, Chinese speakers are less sensitive to a lot of things that English speakers would try to avoid saying.(McWhorter) Losing a languages and perspective would be like not ever being able to experience the sound of a guitar. (Allusion)Music could be considered a language of its own. No band would be complete without a guitar. Just like our world would not be complete without its languages.(Intentional Fragment)
Languages are either lost by parents not being able to teach their kids the language, or that the parents believe that learning that language would be useless. Because of this thought process many languages suffer. Most of these languages consist of native languages such as Otomanguean dialects of Mexico and other indigenous languages of small islands and such. One example of the island language would be Hawaiian. This exotic language is endangered of no longer existing. Having just a few languages will be somewhat productive but in the end it just +makes all the people on earth alike. Some languages that are going extinct in New York would be Judeo-Kashani, Himalayan Languages, and Gottscheerisch, a Germanic language from Slovenia. Ross Perlin, a cofounder of the Endangered Language Alliance, mentioned,”Language is like a bellwether. It’s hard to maintain the full richness, depth and complexity of a culture without its languages”(Roberts). This means that although different ethnicities may exist, without languages the ethnicity would mean little to nothing.
According to Sam Roberts, a writer at the New York Times, normal people who are living everyday lives, can help save the endangered languages of the world. Roberts said that in order for us to save languages, we must “Encourage their families -- grandparents etc -- to pass on the elements of the language and try to find whatever remnants, written or oral, still exist before they are lost forever”(Roberts). According to Matador Network, another way to save languages is to learn one of them. Along with one of the large languages such as Chinese or Spanish, learn some languages such as Swahili or Hawaiian(“What You Can Do to Help Preserve the World’s Endangered Languages”). This way people can learn what might be lost forever. One last way that a person can help save languages would be working with the Endangered Language or donate to the organization. People at these kinds of organizations are doing everything they can to preserve as many languages as possible. There are schools that use voice recordings so that people would know how to pronounce certain words and type of stuff like that. If schools all around the world are doing this, a language would never be lost again. The different perspectives of the world will stay intact and all cultures will remain the way they are right now if not bigger in the future.
I wrote about languages because in my opinion languages are an important to the way people view the world. Language is something that either brings people together or tears them apart. In the end, the main point is that languages are an important thing the world. It brings people together. It tears them apart. It starts something inside of people that allows people to communicate have a good time doing it. Because of languages, there is some diversity among people. People aren’t some mindless robots that roam the streets of New York everyday. The people who are keeping languages alive in New York and the world are trying the best they can to prevent people from becoming these mindless creatures that just work and sleep. In doing so, that puts their time and effort into keeping New York a diverse place, are doing it so they won’t become mindless themselves. The people who work at the Endangered Language Alliance speak either 3 or 4 languages. Because people realize what could be lost if a language is forgotten, linguists like Ross Perlin learn them(Left Branching). Mehta knows what it is like to want to learn a new language because of his son. Sam Roberts knows about what goes away because of all the research he did to write that amazing article. Ordinary people like us are able to learn languages in such educated places. People can learn languages such as Swahili, Cherokee, or some other endangered language. New York is a melting pot, and the different languages that are spoken should be valued so that people can keep it that way.
Works Cited
Evans, Lisa. "Endangered Languages: The Full List." The Guardian. Guardian News and Media,
15 Apr. 2011. Web. 23 Mar. 2017.
"The Fight to Save Endangered Languages." The Fight to Save Endangered Languages |
Cultures of Resistance. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Mar. 2017.
McWhorter, John. "Why Save a Language?" The New York Times. The New York Times, 05 Dec.
2014. Web. 23 Mar. 2017.
Mehta, Suketu. “Tower of Scrabble.” Nonstop Metropolis:A New York City Atlas.eds. Rebecca Solnit
And Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, Oakland, California:University of California Press, 2016. Print
Nuwer, Rachel. "BBC - Future - Languages: Why We Must save Dying Tongues." BBC
News. BBC, n.d. Web. 24 Mar. 2017.
Roberts, Sam. "Listening to (and Saving) the World’s Languages." The New York Times. The
New York Times, 28 Apr. 2010. Web. 23 Mar. 2017.
"What Measures Are Being Taken to save Languages?" Interview by Sam Roberts. New York
Times 23 Feb. 2017: n. pag. Print.
"What You Can Do to Help Preserve the World’s Endangered Languages?" Matador Network.
N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Mar. 2017.
Evans, Lisa. "Endangered Languages: The Full List." The Guardian. Guardian News and Media,
15 Apr. 2011. Web. 23 Mar. 2017.
"The Fight to Save Endangered Languages." The Fight to Save Endangered Languages |
Cultures of Resistance. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Mar. 2017.
McWhorter, John. "Why Save a Language?" The New York Times. The New York Times, 05 Dec.
2014. Web. 23 Mar. 2017.
Mehta, Suketu. “Tower of Scrabble.” Nonstop Metropolis:A New York City Atlas.eds. Rebecca Solnit
And Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, Oakland, California:University of California Press, 2016. Print
Nuwer, Rachel. "BBC - Future - Languages: Why We Must save Dying Tongues." BBC
News. BBC, n.d. Web. 24 Mar. 2017.
Roberts, Sam. "Listening to (and Saving) the World’s Languages." The New York Times. The
New York Times, 28 Apr. 2010. Web. 23 Mar. 2017.
"What Measures Are Being Taken to save Languages?" Interview by Sam Roberts. New York
Times 23 Feb. 2017: n. pag. Print.
"What You Can Do to Help Preserve the World’s Endangered Languages?" Matador Network.
N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Mar. 2017.