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Of the 7,164 or so extant languages on the planet, approximately seven hundred of them are spoken in New York City—“the most linguistically diverse city in history,” writes Ian Frazier in our September 19 issue.

Reviewing a new book by Ross Perlin, codirector of the city’s Endangered Language Alliance, Frazier surveys the many tongues spoken across the five boroughs, in particular the languages that are at risk of dying out, and their speakers—an Ikota-speaking Gabonese on Roosevelt Island, a Guinean man in the Bronx who teaches the African writing system N’Ko, a Seke-speaking Nepalese nurse from Brooklyn, a Ghale-speaking Nepalese cashier and Poqomchi’-speaking Guatemalan deli worker at a Manhattan bodega (which word, Frazier notes, is “derived from the ancient Greek apotheke (storehouse) and related to the Latin apotheca (store), as well as to the French boutique, the Russian and Polish apteka, and the Italian bottega”).

Below, alongside Frazier’s essay, we have compiled a selection of writing from the archives about les langues, teanga, 言語, shprakh—languages.

Ian Frazier
Can We Talk!

Can Babel work? An exhilarating new book about preserving the languages of the most linguistically diverse city in history believes it can.

Gavin Francis
The Babel Within

Two memoirs consider what’s gained and lost when a new language is acquired and a mother tongue is all but forgotten.

—May 26, 2022

Joshua Jelly-Schapiro
Naming New York City

The words we use to refer to streets, buildings, and public places make maps of meaning across the city.

—March 24, 2021

Harold Bloom
The Glories of Yiddish

“Irony is endemic in the very nature of Yiddish, a fusion always conscious of its otherness, whether in regard to German, Russian, or American English. Any native speaker of Yiddish (I am one) can sense that the language’s curious wealth belies its apparent paucity of vocabulary.”

—November 6, 2008

Patricia Craig
Playing to Empty Pockets

“The dominant verse form to emerge [in Ireland] in the second half of the seventeenth century was aisling (vision) poetry, which produced some extremely complex and mellifluous evocations of the nationalist mood before lapsing into repetition and triteness. It is a purely escapist genre which follows a set pattern: the poet falls asleep in some appropriately romantic spot, and in the dream that ensues he is visited by a fairy prophetess of Gaelic resurgence.”

—May 13, 1982

J. Z. Young
Animal Babel

“Almost any feature of animal structure and behavior may be used for symbolic communication. Bees do it by dancing, ants by touching each other with the antennae, and butterflies by smell. Grasshoppers call to each other by sounds, and fireflies flash to find their mates. The females answer the flashes of the males and there are even examples where carnivorous fireflies lure others to death by misleading communications.”

—March 9, 1978

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