Lunch & Learn: Language City

Join the NYC Department of Records and Information Services (DORIS) each month for our virtual Lunch & Learn Series – an intimate conversation with agency staff and special guests focusing on the collections of the Municipal Archives and Library and the history of New York City.

Today, half of the world’s 7,000-plus languages grow increasingly endangered, while contemporary cities, supported by migration, are more linguistically diverse than ever before. As speakers migrate across the globe, linguists and language activists are racing against time to map and document lesser-known, minority, endangered, and Indigenous languages.

Join us on Wednesday, January 21, as Ross Perlin, author of Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues, examines the past, present, and future of the world’s most linguistically diverse city, New York. He will also discuss multilingualism, language policy, and the role technology plays in the evolution and documentation of languages.

About the Author:

Ross Perlin is a linguist, writer, and translator from New York City. He has served as the co-director of the non-profit organization, the Endangered Language Alliance, and oversees research projects focused on language documentation, mapping, policy, and public programming.

Specializing in Himalayan languages, Ross has created a trilingual dictionary, a corpus of recordings, and a descriptive grammar of Trung, an endangered language of southwest China, based on several years of fieldwork. He has also written for The New York Times, The Guardian, and Harper's, published a book on unpaid work and youth economics, Intern Nation, and teaches linguistics at Columbia University.