[lg policy] NY: Listening to (and Saving) the World ’s Languages

[Harold Schiffman]

April 28, 2010
Listening to (and Saving) the World’s Languages
By SAM ROBERTS

The chances of overhearing a conversation in Vlashki, a variant of
Istro-Romanian, are greater in Queens than in the remote mountain
villages in Croatia that immigrants now living in New York left years
ago. At a Roman Catholic Church in the Morrisania section of the
Bronx, Mass is said once a month in Garifuna, an Arawakan language
that originated with descendants of African slaves shipwrecked near
St. Vincent in the Caribbean and later exiled to Central America.
Today, Garifuna is virtually as common in the Bronx and in Brooklyn as
in Honduras and Belize.

And Rego Park, Queens, is home to Husni Husain, who, as far he knows,
is the only person in New York who speaks Mamuju, the Austronesian
language he learned growing up in the Indonesian province of West
Sulawesi. Mr. Husain, 67, has nobody to talk to, not even his wife or
children. “My wife is from Java and my children were born in Jakarta —
they don’t associate with the Mamuju,” he said. “I don’t read books in
Mamuju. They don’t publish any. I only speak Mamuju when I go back or
when I talk to my brother on the telephone.”

These are not just some of the languages that make New York the most
linguistically diverse city in the world. They are part of a
remarkable trove of endangered tongues that have taken root in New
York — languages born in every corner of the globe and now more
commonly heard in various corners of New York than anywhere else.
While there is no precise count, some experts believe New York is home
to as many as 800 languages — far more than the 176 spoken by students
in the city’s public schools or the 138 that residents of Queens, New
York’s most diverse borough, listed on their 2000 census forms.

“It is the capital of language density in the world,” said Daniel
Kaufman, an adjunct professor of linguistics at the Graduate Center of
the City University of New York. “We’re sitting in an endangerment hot
spot where we are surrounded by languages that are not going to be
around even in 20 or 30 years.” In an effort to keep those voices
alive, Professor Kaufman has helped start a project, the Endangered
Language Alliance, to identify and record dying languages, many of
which have no written alphabet, and encourage native speakers to teach
them to compatriots.

“It’s hard to use a word like preserve with a language,” said Robert
Holman, who teaches at Columbia and New York University and is working
with Professor Kaufman on the alliance. “It’s not like putting jelly
in a jar. A language is used. Language is consciousness. Everybody
wants to speak English, but those lullabies that allow you to go to
sleep at night and dream — that’s what we’re talking about.” With
national languages and English encroaching on the linguistic isolation
of remote islands and villages, New York has become a Babel in reverse
— a magnet for immigrants and their languages.

New York is such a rich laboratory for languages on the decline that
the City University Graduate Center is organizing an endangered
languages program. “The quickening pace of language endangerment and
extinction is viewed by many linguists as a direct consequence of
globalization, said Juliette Blevins, a distinguished linguist hired
by City University to start the program. In addition to dozens of
Native American languages, vulnerable foreign languages that
researchers say are spoken in New York include Aramaic, Chaldic and
Mandaic from the Semitic family; Bukhari (a Bukharian Jewish language,
which has more speakers in Queens than in Uzbekistan or Tajikistan),
Chamorro (from the Mariana Islands), Irish Gaelic, Kashubian (from
Poland), indigenous Mexican languages, Pennsylvania Dutch,
Rhaeto-Romanic (spoken in Switzerland) and Romany (from the Balkans)
and Yiddish.

Researchers plan to canvass a tiny Afghan neighborhood in Flushing,
Queens, for Ormuri, which is believed to be spoken by a small number
of people in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Endangered Language
Alliance will apply field techniques usually employed in exotic and
remote foreign locales as it starts its research in the city’s vibrant
ethnic enclaves. “Nobody had gone from area to area looking for
endangered languages in New York City spoken by immigrant
populations,” Professor Kaufman said. The United Nations keeps an
atlas of languages facing extinction, and U.N. experts as well as
linguists generally agree that a language will probably disappear in a
generation or two when the population of native speakers is both too
small and in decline. Language attrition has also been hastened by
war, ethnic cleansing and compulsory schooling in a national tongue.

Over the decades in the secluded northeastern Istrian Peninsula along
the Adriatic Sea, Croatian began to replace the language spoken by
what is described as Europe’s smallest surviving ethnic group. But
after Istrians began immigrating to Queens, many to escape grinding
poverty, they largely abandoned Croatian and returned to speaking
Vlashki. “Whole villages were emptied,” said Valnea Smilovic, 59, who
came to the United States in the 1960s with her parents and her
brother and sister. “Most of us are here now in this country.”

Mrs. Smilovic still speaks in Vlashki with her 92-year-old mother, who
knows little English, as well as her siblings. “Not too much, though,”
Mrs. Smilovic said, because her husband only speaks Croatian and her
son, who was born in America speaks English and a smattering of
Croatian. “Do I worry that our culture is getting lost?” Mrs. Smilovic
asked. “As I get older, I’m thinking more about stuff like that. Most
of the older people die away and the language dies with them.” Several
years ago, one of her cousins, Zvjezdana Vrzic, an Istrian-born
adjunct professor of linguistics at New York University, organized a
meeting in Queens about preserving Vlashki. She was stunned by the
turnout of about 100 people.

“A language reflects a singular nature of a people speaking it,” said
Professor Vrzic, who recently published an audio Vlashki phrasebook
and is working on an online Vlashki-Croatian-English dictionary.
Istro-Romanian is classified by Unesco as severely endangered, and
Professor Vrzic said she believed the several hundred native speakers
who live in Queens outnumber those in Istria. “Nobody tried to teach
it to me,” she said. “It was not thought of as something valuable,
something you wanted to carry on to another generation.”

A few fading foreign languages have also found niches around New York
and the country. In northern New Jersey, Neo-Aramaic, rooted in the
language of Jesus and the Talmud, is still spoken by Syrian immigrants
and is taught at Syriac Orthodox churches in Paramus and Teaneck. The
Rev. Eli Shabo speaks Neo-Aramaic at home and his children do, too,
but only “because I’m their teacher.” Will their children carry on the
language? “If they marry another person of Syriac background, they
may,” Father Shabo said. “If they marry an American, I’d say no.”

And in Long Island, researchers have found several people fluent in
Mandaic, a Persian variation of Aramaic spoken by a few hundred people
around the world. One of them, Dakhil Shooshtary, a 76-year-old
retired jeweler who settled on Long Island from Iran 45 years ago, is
compiling a Mandaic dictionary. For Professor Kaufman, of the Graduate
Center, the quest for speakers of disappearing languages has sometimes
involved serendipity. After making a fruitless trip in 2006 to
Indonesia to find speakers of Mumuju, he attended a family wedding two
years ago in Queens, and Mr. Husain happened to be sitting next to
him. Wasting no time, he has videotaped Mr. Husain speaking in his
native tongue.

“This is maybe the first time that anyone has recorded a video of the
language being spoken,” Professor Kaufman said, who founded a
Manhattan research center, the Urban Field Station for Linguistic
Research, two years ago. He has also recruited Daowd I. Salih , a
45-year-old refugee from Darfur who lives in New Jersey and is a
personal care assistant at a home for the elderly, to teach Massalit,
a tribal language, to a linguistic class at New York University. They
are meticulously creating a Massalit lexicography to codify grammar,
definitions and pronunciations. “Language is identity,” said Mr.
Salih, who has been in the United States for a decade. “So many
African tribes in Darfur lost their languages. This is the land of
opportunity, so these students can help us write this language instead
of losing it.”

Speakers of Garifuna, which is being displaced in Central America by
Spanish and English, are striving to keep it alive in their New York
neighborhoods. Regular classes have sprouted at the Yurumein House
Cultural Center in the Bronx, and also in Brooklyn, where James
Lovell, a public school music teacher, leads a small Garifuna class at
the Biko Transformation Center in East Bushwick. Mr. Lovell, who came
to New York from Belize in 1990, said his oldest children, 21-year-old
twin boys, do not speak Garifuna. “They can get along speaking Spanish
or English, so there’s no need to as far as they’re concerned,” he
said, adding that many compatriots feel “they will get nowhere with
their Garifuna culture, so they decide to assimilate.”

But as he witnessed his language fading among his friends and his
family, Mr. Lovell decided to expose his younger children to their
native culture. Mostly through simple bilingual songs that he
accompanies with gusto on his guitar, he is teaching his two younger
daughters, Jamie, 11, and Jazelle, 7, and their friends. “Whenever
they leave the house or go to school, they’re speaking English,” Mr.
Lovell said. “Here, I teach them their history, Garifuna history. I
teach them the songs, and through the songs, I explain to them what
it’s saying. It’s going to give them a sense of self, to know
themselves. The fact that they’re speaking the language is empowerment
in itself.”




-- http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/29/nyregion/29lost.html?hp
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