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The World Capital of Endangered Languages

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The World Capital of Endangered Languages
LenapeCherokeeSyrian Judeo-ArabicJudeo-SpanishLakotaRusynKumeyaayPangasinanMāoriNauaranChuukeseMapucheWestern ArmenianMarshalleseGilbertesePalauanWest AmbaeScottish GaelicHaketiaBukhoriChamorroIrishSorani KurdishMoroccan Judeo-ArabicZazaBartangiPuerto Rican Sign LanguageBaltiHawaiianP’urhépechaNahuatlGarifunaKaqchikelMamMahoukaEbriéGullahBétéTlapanecMojaveTaíno

Hundreds of
the world’s endangered
and threatened languages

are spoken
in and around New York City.

One project set out to document them.

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The Endangered Languages of New York By Alex Carp

Dots on the maps in this piece represent, among other things, efforts to revitalize a language as well as communities of speakers.

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Most people think of endangered languages as far-flung or exotic, the opposite of cosmopolitan. “You go to some distant mountain or island, and you collect stories,” the linguist Ross Perlin says, describing a typical view of how such languages are studied. But of the 700 or so speakers of Seke, most of whom can be found in a cluster of villages in Nepal, more than 150 have lived in or around two apartment buildings in Brooklyn. Bishnupriya Manipuri, a minority language of Bangladesh and India, has become a minority language of Queens.

All told, there are more endangered languages in and around New York City than have ever existed anywhere else, says Perlin, who has spent 11 years trying to document them. And because most of the world’s languages are on a path to disappear within the next century, there will likely never be this many in any single place again.

Language loss has been a natural part of human history for centuries, but it was typically small in scale and relatively confined. The lost language could sometimes leave traces in the language that overtook it, what linguists have called a “grammatical merger” of intersecting societies.

About 30 years ago, though, the linguists Ken Hale and Michael Krauss warned of a new, more dire form of loss in which a dominant language would “simply overwhelm Indigenous, local languages and cultures.” Hundreds of languages were essentially gone, Krauss noted, and others were quickly fading. Several were spoken by as few as one or two people.

As Perlin writes in his new book — “Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York,” out this month — what stands to be lost is more than mere words. “Languages represent thousands of natural experiments: ways of seeing, understanding and living that should rightly form a major part of any meaningful account of what it is to be human.”

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With Daniel Kaufman, also a linguist, Perlin directs the Endangered Language Alliance, in Manhattan. When E.L.A. was founded, in 2010, Perlin lived in the Chinese Himalayas, where he studied Trung, a language with no standard writing system, dictionary or codified grammar. (His work helped establish all three.) He spent most of his time in the valley where the largest group of remaining speakers lived; the only road in or out was impassable in winter.

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After three years, Perlin returned to New York City, where he had grown up. At that time, E.L.A. conducted language surveys on foot, canvassing neighborhoods and posting fliers seeking speakers of endangered languages. Most of the work was directed by the organization’s founders: two linguists, including Kaufman, and a poet.

In 2016, E.L.A. began to map the languages spoken in the city. A vast majority were not recognized by large businesses, schools or city government. Officially, Perlin said, they were simply not there. “None of the communities with whom we planned to partner were recorded as even existing in the census,” Kaufman and Perlin later wrote.

Since their project began, Perlin and Kaufman have located speakers of more than 700 languages. Of those languages, at least 150 are listed as under significant threat in at least one of three major databases for the field. Perlin and Kaufman consider that figure to be conservative, and Perlin estimates that more than half of the languages they documented may be endangered.

KulungIsanMonguorBahingSekeSampangChamlingSherpaThakaliSunwarNewariBantawaNachhiringLimbuTsumTekpa LogaGhaleChantyalIranunHyolmoPampanganBanguinguiKaikeGyalsmudoMagarPangasinanKham MagarChavacanoLoke

In Queens, according to Perlin, more languages are spoken per square mile than anywhere else in the world.

Where Woodside, Elmhurst and Jackson Heights meet, E.L.A. has encountered dozens of South Asian languages, many of which are under some level of threat.

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Among the endangered languages shown here is Seke, a language from Nepal that has only 700 or so global speakers.

A language’s endangerment is not simply a function of its size but also a measure of its relationship to the societies around it. Sheer numbers “have always mattered less than intergenerational transmission,” Perlin writes in “Language City.” Until recently, in many regions of the world, dozens of languages lived side by side, each with no more than a few thousand speakers. Gurr-goni, an Aboriginal Australian language, had long been stable with 70. A language survives, Perlin writes, by sharing life with those who speak it: “Only in the face of intense political, economic, religious or social pressures do people stop passing on their mother tongues to children.”

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When Perlin visited Seke-speaking Nepali villages in 2019 and 2023, he found that many of the people he wanted to speak with had left to find work. “Whole age groups were missing,” he says. Kaufman points to Mixtec, a group of Indigenous languages spoken in south-central Mexico, with 500,000 speakers. The differences in how the language is spoken from village to village can be “bigger than you find between French and Italian,” he said. “And there are villages where there are essentially no young people.” Their children are now born elsewhere — Culiacán, Mexico City, New York, Los Angeles. “500,000 speakers can disappear in a generation.”

ManinkaN’koFulaniDangmeGaGourmaJolaKriolKonyankaMarkaBalanta-Ganja

Perlin writes that more than 100 West African languages are spoken in Harlem and the Bronx.

In a small slice of the South Bronx, the E.L.A. has encountered at least ten endangered or threatened West African languages.

N’Ko, a writing system developed in 1949 that unites some of these spoken languages, is also being taught.

Perlin studies languages for what they communicate both explicitly and indirectly. A language’s lexicon is not “just one word after another,” he writes in “Language City,” but a representation of the enduring preoccupations of a culture. Its rules of grammar are held together by invisible selections of what will be conveyed and what will be overlooked. It “requires speakers to mark out certain parts of reality and not others, however unconsciously.”

When Perlin and Kaufman document a language, they work alongside native speakers to transcribe and translate video interviews that are recorded locally and during trips to a language’s home region. (Perlin and Kaufman have helped produce some of the first dictionaries and grammars of these languages.) To document Seke, for example, Perlin works with Rasmina Gurung, a 26-year-old nurse who happens to be one of the youngest Seke speakers in the world. Most Seke speakers, about 500 people, live across five neighboring villages in northern Nepal, near Tibet. Though the villages are within walking distance, each has developed its own Seke dialect. Like many of the smaller languages of “traditional face-to-face societies,” Perlin writes, Seke has no “formal, all-purpose hello,” because villagers live among the same groups of people and rarely encounter a Seke-speaking stranger. Instead, a question — Where are you going? What are you doing? — would be more common.

When E.L.A. researchers travel to interview speakers in their home regions, they may begin with a list of common questions, but the conversations are often more free-form. “Whatever the speakers want to talk about the most, we always encourage that,” Gurung says. “We always want to understand the language better, but we need to understand where it came from, how it came to be. Whatever’s close to home.”

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As E.L.A. produced its first language maps, the institute’s work caught the eye of Thelma Carrillo, a research scientist in the city’s Health Department. Carrillo, who is part Zapotec, was working on a Latino health initiative, but the city had what Perlin and Kaufman found to be “no basic demographic information” on New Yorkers from Indigenous communities in Latin America, even though they have been migrating here in large numbers since the 1990s.

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“We found ourselves in this odd position of being a conduit between the Indigenous Latin Americans of the city and the city agencies, because other organizations that work with them see them as Mexican or Guatemalan,” Kaufman says. “We’re working with their languages, which becomes extremely important when you need to communicate something to them.”

By the start of the pandemic, the city had begun official outreach in nine Indigenous languages and recorded videos in several other endangered languages. By reaching these communities in their own languages, New York City offered what is almost certainly the first official recognition that they exist.

Still, Perlin and Kaufman are keenly aware that the corpus they are building — word by word and sometimes syllable by syllable — might someday turn out to be a kind of fossil record.

Outside of the office, Gurung mostly speaks Seke in voice notes to elders overseas or to tell her mother a secret she doesn’t want her sister to hear. On her first trip to Nepal with E.L.A., she ended every interview with the same question: “Do you think our language will survive?”

Methodology

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The maps showing endangered languages in New York City are based on a map provided by the Endangered Language Alliance. We cross-referenced E.L.A.’s New York City language list with three independent databases that track the threat level of languages around the world: Ethnologue, which catalogs all known living languages in the world; UNESCO’s World Atlas of Languages, a survey of all the languages spoken in UNESCO member states; and the Endangered Languages Project, a site to which the public can contribute content, managed by the First Peoples’ Cultural Council and the Endangered Languages Catalogue (ELCat) project at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Each of these projects determines how threatened a language is in a slightly different way. Criteria include the number of global speakers and whether multiple generations speak the language and are passing it on to the next. Additional languages were added in consultation with E.L.A.

The audio clips are excerpts from audio provided by E.L.A., which also provided the translations. In one instance, small adjustments to the translation were made to provide context that would have been clear to the speaker. The translation for Ibrahima Traore’s remarks comes from Coleman Donaldson.

Graphics by Francesco Muzzi.

Ruven Afanador is a Colombian-born photographer based in New York. He has worked on numerous portraits for the magazine, including Viola Davis, Denzel Washington, Jane Campion and Sharon Olds.

Alex Carp is a research editor at the magazine. He last wrote for the magazine about Steven Banks, the former Legal Aid lawyer who indirectly built much of New York City’s system of homeless shelters and services.

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N.Y.P.D. Narcotics Unit Under Review After a Beating Is Caught on Tape

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N.Y.P.D. Narcotics Unit Under Review After a Beating Is Caught on Tape

The New York Police Department said on Tuesday that it was launching a three-month review of its narcotics division after two of its detectives were recorded brutally beating a man they had mistakenly arrested during a drug sweep last week.

As part of the review, the Police Department said it had disbanded the team responsible for the drug sweep, a small group within its narcotics unit in Brooklyn. That team was shut down on Friday, and its members have all been reassigned or placed on desk duty, the department said.

The overhaul of the division was announced a week after videos showing two narcotics detectives punching, kicking and dragging a man across the floor of a Brooklyn liquor store spread online.

The videos show the two detectives beating the man, a security guard named Timothy Brown, as they struggle to wrestle him into handcuffs for nearly eight minutes. The department said the arrest had been part of an undercover operation in the area and that the detectives had believed Mr. Brown to be involved in a drug deal. After beating and arresting Mr. Brown, the police determined that they had targeted the wrong man and that Mr. Brown had not been involved in the drug sale.

The police charged Mr. Brown with resisting arrest and obstructing governmental administration, but the Brooklyn District attorney’s office said it would decline to prosecute the case.

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The footage, and news of the mistaken arrest, prompted immediate backlash from New York lawmakers, civil libertarians and police critics, some of whom described the behavior as extrajudicial punishment. Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has been careful not to anger the city’s police force, last week condemned the conduct in his strongest words of criticism since taking office. “The violence used by N.Y.P.D. officers in this video is extremely disturbing and unacceptable,” Mr. Mamdani wrote in a post on social media on Wednesday.

The Police Department moved quickly to discipline the two men in the video, Volkan Maden and Michael P. Algerio, both of whom have served with the N.Y.P.D. for more than a decade. On Wednesday, Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch called the videos “deeply disturbing” and said that both detectives had been placed under investigation and stripped of their guns and shields.

In the following days, the department removed the sergeant who oversaw Detectives Maden and Algerio from his post and placed him on modified duty. By Friday, six more detectives on the team, as well as the lieutenant and captain who oversaw the entire North Brooklyn narcotics operation, had all been reassigned.

In interviews last week, several lawmakers praised Ms. Tisch and Mr. Mamdani for taking swift disciplinary action against what they called a shocking display of police brutality.

“This video looked like something from the 1990s,” Oswald Feliz, the chair of the City Council’s Public Safety committee, said. “This had nothing to do with public safety, it had everything to do with violence and that is violence that we will not and cannot accept.”

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But for some, the behavior of the two veteran detectives raised concerns about how the unit and department was functioning.

Some critics have pointed out that Detectives Maden and Algerio appear to use cellphones, rather than police radios, to call for backup. Others noted that neither appeared to be wearing, or using, body cameras during the arrest.

Lincoln Restler, a city councilman who used to represent the Brooklyn district where the mistaken arrest happened, said the episode had concerned him enough to refer it to the city’s Department of Investigation. In his referral, Mr. Restler requested that the agency examine the Police Department’s communication practices for instances of unauthorized text and phone communication, according to a copy of the email obtained by The New York Times.

In the city’s policing community, reactions to the video have been more mixed. Union leaders and several former officers have chafed at the mayor’s response, defending the behavior of the two detectives and saying that Mr. Brown had no right to resist arrest. (It is not clear from the video whether Mr. Brown was in fact resisting arrest or if he was unable to comply while being beaten.)

“This is what happens when City Hall rushes to judge based on a viral clip instead of facts,” the detective union’s president, Scott Munro, said in a statement last week. “It’s reckless. It’s dangerous. And it’s a failure of leadership.”

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The Police Department said on Tuesday that the 90-day review will aim to address and reform the kind of policy violations raised by Mr. Restler and others. It added that both detectives were being investigated by the department’s Internal Affairs Bureau, which looks into reports of police misconduct.

The review will be led by the chief of department, Michael J. LiPetri, and will examine the policies of the entire narcotics division to make sure that its officers are enforcing their duties “safely and effectively,” the department said.

As part of the process, the department will review the current training that narcotics detectives receive and will ensure that all officers in the unit use “appropriate equipment.” The department also said it would clarify its current policy to require detectives to use body cameras during drug operations.

The department also said it will require commanding officers to regularly check in on the narcotics unit to ensure that it is meeting departmental standards for professional conduct during its operations.

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Harvey Weinstein’s Third Trial on Rape Charge Opens in Manhattan

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Harvey Weinstein’s Third Trial on Rape Charge Opens in Manhattan

She testified last year that she first met the former producer when she was about 27, after moving to Los Angeles to pursue a career in acting. He pressured her into giving him a massage shortly after, she said.

In 2013, she was visiting New York and had planned a morning meal with friends and the producer. He arrived early and got a hotel room over her objections, Ms. Mann testified. Still, she went with him to the room, where he injected his penis with medication that produced an erection and then raped her, she said.

She tried to fight, she said, but eventually “I just gave up, I wanted to get out.”

In the years that followed, Ms. Mann said, she fell into a complex relationship with Mr. Weinstein, which included friendly email exchanges, phone calls and several consensual sexual encounters. In her testimony last year, she called it a “dance” in which she tried to keep him both happy and at a distance. At one point, Ms. Mann said, she decided to enter a romantic relationship with him.

During cross-examination, a lawyer for Mr. Weinstein questioned Ms. Mann about money — close to $500,000 — that she had received as settlement payments through a fund established as part of the bankruptcy of Mr. Weinstein’s company.

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“This is not about money for me,” Ms. Mann testified.

For this trial, Mr. Weinstein has hired a new trial team of Jacob Kaplan, Marc Agnifilo and Teny Geragos.

The lawyers have already signaled that their defense will differ, at least slightly. They have indicated that they will not argue that Ms. Mann made the accusations against their client for financial gain.

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Gotti Grandson Is Sentenced to 15 Months for Covid Relief Fraud

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Gotti Grandson Is Sentenced to 15 Months for Covid Relief Fraud

The grandson of an infamous mob boss was sentenced to prison on Monday after pleading guilty to defrauding the federal government out of more than $1 million in Covid relief funds, some of which he invested in cryptocurrency.

Carmine G. Agnello Jr., the grandson of John J. Gotti, the former leader of the Gambino crime family, was sentenced to 15 months in prison by Judge Nusrat J. Choudhury in Federal District Court in Central Islip, N.Y. She also ordered Mr. Agnello to pay $1.3 million in restitution to the Small Business Administration.

Mr. Agnello, 39, fidgeted in court on Monday. Some of his family members were in attendance, including mob figures previously convicted of federal crimes: his father Carmine (the Bull) Agnello and his uncle John A. Gotti.

Wearing a gray, checkered suit, Mr. Agnello read a brief statement in court calling his crime “wrong, selfish and criminal.” He added that he never wanted to “find myself in prison” like so many of his relatives.

“I regret not only what I did, but the disappointment I caused my family,” he said.

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Starting in April 2020, Mr. Agnello applied for at least three loans for his Queens-based company, Crown Auto Parts & Recycling L.L.C., through a program meant to support small businesses hurt by the pandemic.

He applied for the loans under false pretenses, claiming he did not have a criminal record when he in fact did have one, prosecutors said. He then used more than $400,000 of the borrowed money to invest in a crypto business.

Mr. Agnello pleaded guilty in September 2024 to a single count of wire fraud. Federal prosecutors with the Eastern District of New York had sought a sentence of around three years, as well as $1.3 million in restitution.

He “shamefully lined his own pockets with government and taxpayers’ dollars,” Joseph Nocella Jr., the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in a statement.

As a child, Mr. Agnello starred on the reality television show “Growing Up Gotti” alongside his mother, Victoria Gotti, and two brothers, Frank and John. The show, which ran on A&E for three seasons and was canceled in 2005, depicted a Long Island household in the milieu of “The Sopranos.”

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At the time, Mr. Agnello’s father was in prison and had been divorced from Ms. Gotti, a former columnist for The New York Post, leaving her to raise three rowdy sons. The intense media focus on the Gottis gave the grandson “a distorted sense of reality,” wrote John A. Gotti, Mr. Agnello’s uncle and the leader of the crime family in the 1990s, in a letter to Judge Choudhury before the sentencing.

“Being part of the Gotti family meant growing up with too much attention, expectations and society’s judgment that most kids never have to deal with,” Mr. Gotti wrote. He added that his nephew faced pressure “to live up to the Gotti name.”

Mr. Agnello found his way into the family business, in a way. In 2018, he pleaded guilty to running an unregistered scrap business. That case echoed his father’s racketeering conviction after he firebombed a rival scrap company in Queens that was run by undercover police officers.

Mr. Agnello’s grandfather exercised power with unrelenting brutality and delighted in the spotlight. He seized control of the family by organizing the 1985 assassination of his predecessor, Paul Castellano, before running enterprises that investigators estimated earned about $500 million a year from ventures that included extorting unions, illegal gambling, loan-sharking and stock fraud.

After numerous acquittals in state and federal trials, aided by juries that had been tampered with, Mr. Gotti earned the nickname “Teflon Don” from New York City’s tabloids. He was ultimately convicted in 1992 on 13 criminal counts and died of cancer in 2002 at age 61 in a federal prison hospital.

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Jeffrey Lichtman, a lawyer for Mr. Agnello, told Judge Choudhury that Mr. Agnello had grown up with no male role models in his life, as 15 of his family members had gone to prison, including his grandfather when he was 5 and his father when he was 14.

Mr. Lichtman, who also represented Mr. Agnello’s uncle, called his client’s crime “horrific behavior” but added that his conduct was inevitable.

Charles P. Kelly, a federal prosecutor, said in court on Monday that Mr. Agnello’s family history was no excuse for his fraud.

“This case is not about John Gotti; it’s about Carmine Agnello,” Mr. Kelly said.

This year, Steven Metcalf, another lawyer for Mr. Agnello, asked Judge Choudhury for a sentence with no prison time so that Mr. Agnello could donate a kidney to his mother, who has renal disease and also appeared in court on Monday. Without the transplant, Ms. Gotti could die during her son’s prison term, Mr. Metcalf said.

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But in April, Mr. Agnello hired Mr. Lichtman, who apologized to the judge for Mr. Metcalf’s “voluminous argument” in support of Mr. Agnello, which stretched hundreds of pages.

As Judge Choudhury announced the sentence, Mr. Agnello kept his gaze forward and nodded. Judge Choudhury pushed back on the notion that his upbringing drove him to commit wire fraud.

“You were raised with access to opportunities. These are opportunities that many people in our society do not have,” she said.

After the sentence on Monday, Mr. Agnello embraced his family members in a hallway of the courthouse, one by one, kissing his uncle and his father on the cheek. He must surrender to the authorities to begin serving his prison term by July 20.

Outside the courthouse, his uncle John A. Gotti addressed a group of reporters.

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“We had 15 members of our family who went to prison,” he said. “I think that’s enough. I think we did our time.”

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