<font face="courier new,monospace"><font size="4"><font face="georgia,serif">April 30, 2010<br><br>Desi Anwar: Losing a Language<br>India<br><br>According to an article in The New York Times, New York City is home to as many as 800 languages, many of them in danger of disappearing. This makes it a laboratory of world languages in decline. As official national languages tend to domi n ate because they are a country’s main tongue and English creeps into even the most remote corners of the world, many local languages are fast dying out. <br>
<br>New York, on the other hand, finds itself a Tower of Babel for all sorts of exotic languages and dialects brought in by immigrants who keep their languages alive, at least while there are enough people around who remember how to speak them. <br>
<br>Bukhari, a Persian language spoken by the Bukharian Jews of Central Asia, has more speakers in Queens than in Uzbekistan, the article said. Daniel Kaufman, a professor of linguistics at the City University of New York has addressed the problem by starting the Endangered Language Alliance to research the city’s exotic tongues. Kaufman found, for example, Husni Husain, 67, who speaks Mamuju, a language of West Sulawesi, which he learned as a child. <br>
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