Contemporary New York is the most linguistically diverse city in the world–indeed in the history of the world, with over 700 languages as documented in our Languages of New York map, including many that are endangered, Indigenous, and primarily oral. This is also 3-4 times more than the number found by the Census, which is completely inadequate when it comes to language. New York is certainly a unique and extraordinary case: a Lenape-speaking archipelago, then a Dutch colonial foundation exactly four centuries ago, and the premiere immigration gateway of the Americas since, with the largest foreign-born population in the world today. Linguistic diversity has fundamentally shaped the city’s culture, economy, politics, and patterns of settlement. But what is true of New York is now also increasingly true of cities everywhere, and Language City is a book about urban linguistic diversity, urbanization.

It’s been a long and fascinating road from Intern Nation, a muckraking exposé which launched a national conversation about how unpaid work has become normalized for young people and fundamentally made entry into the white-collar workforce more unequal. I was already well into my PhD in linguistics and my fieldwork in China at the time Intern Nation came out, and on the surface the two books could not be more different. And yet there’s a thread: I’m drawn to large, messy topics hiding in plain sight, where whole ways of seeing the world are at stake. Semantics shape politics at every level. Some of the central issues that I wrestled with around internships and labor had to do with language, and labor issues certainly come out in Language City.

The principle of linguistic equality is a complex one, not widely diffused among non-linguists, but basically it states that every language on a cognitive and communicative level has been able to do everything its speakers or signers have needed to do. No native language is broken or lacking in grammar, and words for new concepts or items can always be borrowed or coined. Inequalities between languages result from inequalities between their users, rooted in power and history. Among the many reasons that endangered languages deserve our respect and support there is the matter of justice, since majority language speakers have done so much for so long to marginalize, demean, and otherwise drive out these languages. There’s much to do at every level, but it’s time for societies and governments to invest seriously in linguistic diversity and language access, so that all people have the ability to use and develop their mother tongues.