Language City
Half the world's 7,000 languages may vanish this century — and hundreds of them are spoken in New York right now.
Acheter : Amazon · Place des libraires · Fnac
Le mot de POP LIVRE
You can hear more languages on a New York subway platform than in most countries, and Perlin has spent years finding out exactly which. He follows six speakers — of languages you have almost certainly never heard named — through their neighbourhoods, jobs and families. The book is as much about migration and belonging as about grammar, and it makes an abstract statistic personal: when a language goes, it takes a way of noticing the world with it.
Présentation
Ross Perlin is a linguist and co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, and he is working against the clock. More than half of the world's seven thousand-plus languages may disappear within a century, and because many have never been recorded, their loss will be permanent. His map-making takes place in the most linguistically diverse city in history: contemporary New York. Perlin retraces the immigration history that produced it, then follows six ordinary yet remarkable speakers of endangered languages deep into their communities to see how they keep those languages alive against long odds. Along the way he opens up unusual grammars, rare sounds and the cultural histories they carry.