More than 7,000 languages currently exist in the world, of which an astonishing 700 are spoken in New York City — more than anyplace else on earth.
“Language and music are portable homelands,” explain the hosts of “Language City,” an eye-opening and entertaining show being presented for free through Sunday at The Glade, one of the two outdoor theaters on Little Island.
It’s inspired by “Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York,” (Atlantic Monthly Press, 432 pages), a fascinating new book by linguist Ross Perlin, who teaches at Columbia and co-directs the non-profit Endangered Language Alliance. The show, like the book (as Perlin explains in it) “is about the most linguistically diverse city in the history of the world: its past, present and future.” Both are also a plea to keep all of the languages in the city alive. Their greatest argument for doing so are the half dozen cast members, now New Yorkers — poets, singers and musicians – who perform on stage in their native tongue.
Kewulay Kamara, a “finah” (keeper of his culture) from Sierra Leone recites his own poetry in Kuranko, a language that is one of the many within the Manding language family (such as Bambara, Jula, Maninka, and Mandinka) which all together are spoken by some 40 million people throughout West Africa. Kuranko is not a written language, but for the sake of the show, Kamara’s words in transliteration and in English translation are projected onto separate screens, as he recites his poems, the first about the first time he saw snow, and, later, about a woman from his homeland named Kani Kurya who “disappeared” during the time of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. That poem ends:
Nde, Kewulɛn,
Kani Kurya mamanɛ, mamanɛ
Le kume ke for la wo
Kani Kurya a yan
I, Kewulen,
grandchild of Kani Kurya’s grandchild,
am telling you,
Kani Kurya is here
Irwin Sánchez, recites his poetry in Nahuatl, the most commonly spoken indigenous language in Mexico, a country with an estimated 282 indigenous languages. Sanchez, one of the six new-New Yorkers profiled at length in Perlin’s book, is a chef originally from Puebla, whose revival of indigenous Mexican cooking (complete with food names in Nahuatl) was nominated for a James Beard Award.
Accompanied by Vasilios Koutsoumbaris on a Ntauli drum, Dimistris Stefanidis played lively traditional melodies with a stringed instrument called the lyra and sang in a language called Pontiaká, or Pontic Greek, but very different from the Greek of Athens; fewer than 300,000 were estimated to have spoken twenty years ago; it’s surely still fewer now. The Pontic Greek community, which originated in what is now Turkey, has long struggled to survive — many were killed in the Ottoman genocide – which is reflected in the lyrics of one of their songs, Patrida m’araevo se (I’m searching for you my homeland):
I’ve built five houses and I was thrown out from all of them
I’m a refugee from birth, my God, I’m on the edge of madness
I’m looking for you, my homeland, like a cursed man
I’m a Greek abroad, and a foreigner in Greece
Tenzin Donsel, accompanied by Tenzin Chunney on a stringed instrument called a dranyen, sings in Tibetan several gorgeous old folk songs from far western Tibet, from a genre known as Nangma toeshey, popular at parties, weddings, and on YouTube among people from across the Great Himalayas. They are among the newest additions to New York; specifically Queens (as we’re told, and also shown, in one of the several videos in the show, which all seemed at best unnecessary.)
Each of these performers is introduced by our three hosts – Julia Gu, Malcolm Opoku, and Shubhra Prakash – who, in-between the songs and poems, tell a narrative of New York through its languages, starting with the “original language.” Lenape lives on in many place names here (Gowanus, Rockaway, Maspeth) but currently is the first language only of a lone woman in her eighties living in a small Canadian town, although there is an effort to revive it.
From there, they go through historic/linguistic/immigrant milestones. Some of them are familiar to those who remember their school history classes (1624, Nieuw Amsterdam, founded by the Dutch, but many were not Dutch and didn’t speak it; “the first 400 New Amsterdammers spoke a reported 18 languages.”) Most are not so familiar, especially in the present day, when “half of all New Yorkers speak a language other than English at home,” and new communities have new names for old neighborhoods, such as “Registan, a name which connects Rego Park, Queens with a square in Samarkand, Uzbekistan.”
The hosts drive home this diversity with their own stories. Opoku, for example, introduces himself: “I’m Malcolm in English, but in Akan—the most widely spoken language in Ghana—I’m called Kwame, as boys born on Saturdays are. This is how naming works for Akan people: Monday boys are Kojo and Monday girls are Adwoa….”
About halfway through this 90-minute show, Prakash says: “Nearly 200,000 asylum seekers have arrived in just the last few years, an unprecedented challenge for the city.” It’s just a brief observation in this show, in sharp contrast to the way this “challenge” drives the national conversation. “Language City,” among its other charms, offers a deeply refreshing way to think about the arrival of new people, and peoples, in New York.
“Diaspora: dia spora, a Greek word for scattering, is now a universal condition,” Shubhra Prakash tells us at one point, and the others chime in with the word in three other world languages – which is to say, New York languages.
“Language City” is free at The Glade for two more performances, Saturday and Sunday. No tickets necessary. Just show up; first come, first served.
