At the time of writing, the current population of New York City is 8.468 million people. In 2018, 3.1 million of these residents were immigrants. These 3.1 million—and the millions of immigrants before them, all the way back to the founding of New Amsterdam in 1624—brought their languages with them. In Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York, linguist Ross Perlin talks about New York City as an unexpected repository for the world’s languages, from the most widely spoken to some of the most rarely spoken. He highlights the work of staff and volunteers at the Endangered Languages Alliance to record and preserve languages on the rarer end of things...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.