Life in London has been mapped according to its health, wealth, land ownership, politics and transportation at key points in its long history. But it must now be mapped in a way that tells a different story: the story of language itself.
Ross Perlinan academic who claimed a prestigious £25,000 book prize last week revealed plans for a mapping project with British researchers which will reveal the whereabouts of the speakers of the capital’s most at-risk languages. The map, they believe, would be a first step to saving them.
Perlin, an American linguist, had already worked with New York’s Endangered Language Association (ELA), where he is associate director, to create a clear geographic picture of the vast variety of languages spoken in New York’s five boroughs. However, it is important that the map also indicates the most isolated surviving language communities.
“It is essential to protect and understand the diversity of languages spoken in a city because of the human knowledge and culture they hold,” Perlin said after accepting the British Academy Prize for Global Understanding for his book received. City of Language: The Battle to Preserve Endangered Mother Languages. “London may now be second only to New York in the number of endangered languages spoken.”
He said the map would be “very useful” for London. “I’d like to put together a map using the same open source methods we used in New York,” he added. The original project, believed to be the first of its kind in the world, and which can be seen on the ELA website, was created using information sent to academics and researchers based at the association’s headquarters in the Flatiron district of Manhattan work. So far, the group, which has a mission to document and support the range of languages in cities classified as “hyperdiverse,” has now mapped more than 700 language varieties in New York with the support of Columbia University, where Perlin teaches .
London, Perlin suspects, is affected by similar economic pressures: “As in New York, some of the linguistic diversity has now been pushed out by the high cost of housing, and this creates other pockets of small language groups in other parts of the country . It can be more difficult for these groups in places where there is not the same recent experience of speaking multiple languages and this can lead to isolation. There must be a process of mediation and understanding.” The threat to an endangered language can come from this kind of pressure, but it is never something that Perlin sees as a “natural death.” Around the world, almost half of all languages are spoken by communities of fewer than 10,000, while hundreds have just 10 speakers or fewer.
In London’s boroughs, previous studies have shown that the chances of meeting Polish are higher on the streets of Croydon, while you are more likely to hear Punjabi in Ealing than you are in Camden, where French speakers are common. But now Perlin intends to delve further into “the deepest levels of human diversity”.
“If you go to the Green Lanes area in North Londonas I did recently, you’ll hear many different Turkish languages spoken, but you’ll also hear Kurdish, Cypriot, some types of Bulgarian and some Italian variations,” Perlin said.
In a large city, the composition of the population is shaped by war, poverty and trade, and in London the colonial past also still leaves its traces. For example, the tradition of Nepali men joining the Gurkha regiments of the British Army attracted a stream of immigrants, especially from certain Nepali language groups, including speakers of endangered Seke.
“These links and histories create the language vectors in a city,” Perlin said. “There is always a logic behind the movement of a small language group. Ideally, each should be celebrated, just as the real estate market sometimes celebrates the diversity of food and culture.”
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Perlin’s book makes the point that speaking multiple languages, rather than one, is historically more common and that most human languages were oral rather than written. The emergence of a dominant language can be useful as a common currency for communication, he says, but it should not have greater status. The linguist’s joke about the distinction between a language and a dialect is that a language is just a dialect that has an army and a navy.
While many smaller language groups are in London to do manual labour, and are therefore vulnerable to discrimination when they are not understood, there are also small language groups within wealthy populations. Diplomats and wealthy expats form other distinct groups.
Perlin is now intrigued by the impact of religion and evangelism on the spread and decline of languages. While Christian missionary work helped spread dominant Western languages, the missionaries themselves often studied local languages and dialects and adopted them for the first time.
Fittingly, his next book will be an examination of the phenomenon of the most translated film of all time, The Jesus film. It was made in America in 1979 and has been made available in over 2,100 languages and will be remade as an animation next year.
