The title and subtitle may make this book sound rather esoteric. But in that case they are unintentionally misleading. You don’t have to be a linguist or a cultural anthropologist to enjoy reading Language City.

If I still have your attention, let me explain why you will enjoy it without any relevant professional background. First, it contains very little linguistic theory. Second, the bulk of it is about people, not linguistics, although a few parts of it do suffer from containing too many lists, such as the sentence “Urdu and Punjabi are widely spoken, but there are also speakers of Pashto, Sindhi, Saraiki, and Pothwari, as well as of the endangered languages of Pakistan’s mountainous north (Balti, Burushaski, Kalashi, Khowar, Shina, Wakhi), who organize under the regional rubric of Gilgit-Baltistan.” You are forgiven if most of that is Greek to you.

You also don’t have to know much about New York, although it helps to have some awareness of Brooklyn and Queens. Just think of Language City as a portrait of real people speaking dozens — nay, hundreds — of often obscure languages in the greatest city in the world.

Categories: Books, Linguistics