This year we did a bit of everything: a book, a play, a summer program, a huge range of events for different audiences, and—as always—ongoing original research with languages and communities from around the world.
Worldwide, it was a year dominated by consequential elections and questions of migration, mobility, and culture. As the only organization anywhere focused on urban linguistic diversity, ELA has a perspective and a track record on this. Year in year out, our work shows that cities are extraordinary linguistic laboratories that we have barely even begun to explore, appreciate, or support. We depend on all the languages, cultures, and ideas around us. The first step is to listen.
Here are some highlights from the previous year:
In January, five of us were at the Linguistic Society of America’s major annual conference (its 100th anniversary!) presenting highlights from a decade of work, with Mixtec, Wakhi, and Bishnupriya Manipuri among the languages in focus. February saw the launch of our new book Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York, together with a glossy, high-tech feature in the New York Times Magazine, just in time for International Mother Language Day. March and April were packed with book events, reviews, and panels including at all three of the city’s public library systems (New York, Brooklyn, and Queens), the think tank New America, and the New England Translators Association—to name just a few. We were also finishing up a project with the contemporary art museum PS1, which is thinking boldly about what it means to be a multilingual cultural institution today.
May saw fieldwork in the Caucasus, followed by presentations to audiences in Berlin and Paris, and then in June a visit to the Philippines, where co-director Kaufman has been closely involved in a series of workshops to support teachers working within the groundbreaking but embattled Mother Tongue–Based Multilingual Education program. In July summer volunteers did primary fieldwork much closer to home, at our office on 18th Street, with a young Afghani refugee from the remote Nuristan region who speaks a language that has hardly been documented. August, after months of preparation, was the realization of one of our most ambitious experiments yet: an original theater piece, based on Language City and created together with Gung Ho Projects, which we presented over the course of a week at the unique venue Little Island, inlcuding performances in Tibetan, Nahuatl, Kuranko, and Pontic Greek.
In September, we held our sold-out Jewish Languages of Brooklyn tour, meeting speakers and encountering sites for Haketia, Judeo-Arabic, and Juhuri—unwittingly going TikTok viral in the process. Language City won the British Academy Prize for Global Cultural Understanding in October, with events continuing from Massachusetts to New Jersey to London (not to mention an epic Spanish-language literary festival in Manhattan). During November, language-related arts were in focus: weekly textile and language sessions for Indigenous Mexican New York women with artist Cinthya Santos Briones and Museo del Barrio, plus a masterful workshop with a celebrated Indian typographer/calligrapher/all-around “fontwallah”. In December, our ever-continuing language mapping efforts on languagemap.nyc are bringing us close to a total of 750 languages, including several sign languages we can now report as being used in the city for the first time.
As for 2025, we’ll be celebrating our 15th year in existence! In various ways we’ll continue to develop in all of the above, no matter the challenges. We’re still not the best at sending updates, but we’ll do our best to keep posting key updates on elalliance.org as well as on Instagram and Facebook, plus these occasional newsletters that we hope are easy on your inbox. And it may take a little time, but we’ll do our best to respond if you write to us.
For now, mark your calendars! 1/29 is Translation Night, 2/11 is the paperback release of Language City (already available for pre-order), and on 2/21 we’ll celebrate International Mother Language Day with a live event.
