A place on earth is like the Tower of Babel, and it is not surprisingly the city considered the most cosmopolitan in the world:New York. The American metropolis is the place of 800 languages, and Queens, one of its 5 districts, is the space where the greatest number of them are spoken – nationally but also globally – according to the Endangered Language Alliance association. To capture this awe-inspiring reality, writer Rebecca Solnit and humanities and social sciences professor Jeremy J. Shapiro incorporated into their book Nonstop Metropolis:A New York City Atlas a very telling card, as reported by the site Business Insider . It shows the many languages spoken between the neighborhoods of Astoria and Forest Hills, which represent the limits of Queens.
Over a distance of 8 kilometres, it is therefore possible to hear Greek, Filipino (official language in the Philippines), Russian, Japanese, Lithuanian, Indonesian, or even other less widespread languages such as Chavacano (a Filipino Creole based on Spanish) and Bukhori spoken by the Jewish people of Central Asia. And taking a closer look at the map drawn up by illustrator Molly Roy – who has documented herself with local libraries and museums, we find languages that speak to us much more (that pun!) as Europeans:Portuguese, Croatian, Swedish, Norwegian, Hungarian, Danish, Italian… But no French. There is, however, a regional language very local to us:Breton!
It would seem that the Big Apple is the place to be to become a real polyglot… We are very tempted by the idea of a language stay!
