Language City

By describing the great variety of languages spoken in various New York City neighborhoods, the author covers a wide range of pertinent issues—migration and immigration, cultural integrity, endangered languages, and community building. As you meet the characters he interviews and walk the streets of New York City with him, you are deeply engaged at the remarkable wisdom and beauty inherent in these languages, the crucial importance of cultural identity, and you further appreciate the importance of cosmopolitan living and learning, as well as the obvious threats to that way of life.

This book takes something so in-your-face yet so often ignored about New York and other 21st-century global metropolises—their polyglot nature—and makes it the focus. I know when I arrive in a major city, the cacophony of myriad languages stands out on that first subway, bus, and tram ride. But soon enough, it all becomes background noise.

By foregrounding this phenomenon, arguing that it’s peaking today as global migration swells, and telling the stories of several tenacious language communities in New York’s outer boroughs, Perlin reads NYC through the alphabets that cover its bodega awnings.