Qns. College professor works to save dying languages
BY BILL PARRY
With languages all over
the world at risk of extinction,
a Queens College
professor is committed to
conserving them.
Daniel Kaufman, who began
teaching at the Flushing
campus in 2015, finds the borough
to be an ideal location for
his work.
“As many as 800 distinct
languages are spoken in New
York City,” Kaufman said.
“Queens is the epicenter
of that global
inguistic diversity.”
But words aren’t all that
the professor is documenting.
“Each elder speaker within
a smaller language community
will have unique knowledge
of that language and culture
that can be easily lost if it’s
not passed down or recorded,”
he said.
Around Jackson Heights
and the surrounding neighborhoods,
Kaufman’s team finds
communities with origins in
Nepal, India, Indonesia, the
Philippines and Mexico, all of
which happen to be among the
most multilingual nations in
the world.
Within the Nepali community,
languages such as
Thakali and Mustangi are
found among many other endangered
Tibeto-Burman languages.
Within the sprawling
Filipino community, Pangasinan
and Kapampangan are
heard, languages that are now
rarely passed down to younger
generations.
The census shows that
Jackson Heights is the most
linguistically diverse neighborhood
in the United States
while Kaufman thinks the
area might have the highest
linguistic density anywhere
in the world.
“There is one building
where seven community organizations
were housed in seven
offices, each one representing
a different Nepalese town
and language,” he said.
In Rego Park, you will find
what may be the largest community
of Bukhari speakers.
The Jewish dialect of Tajik
originating in Central Asia, a
language which is now spoken
mostly in diaspora.
Kaufman conducts part of
his research on campus at his
Queens Colloege professor Daniel Kaufman chronicles the world’s
disappearing languages and he considers the borough an ideal location
for his work. Courtesy of Andy Poon/Queens College
language documentation lab,
one of only a handful in the
country. Students can borrow
equipment to record languages
spoken in their families and
communities, which they then
study applying scientific principles
on linguistic analysis.
Students are actively involved
in the lab’s work.
One student, Tysean Bucknor,
recorded Belizean Creole,
an under-researched language,
and how it is changing
across three generations of
speakers within his family.
Bucknor is now enrolled in a
Ph.D. program in linguistics
and continuing the project
through fieldwork in Belize.
Another student, Tenzin
Namdol, recruited her friends
to contribute narratives in
the Mustang language for the
Voices of Himalaya project,
which Kaufman is involved
in. The project has collected
dozens of narratives documenting
the linguistic diversity
of the burgeoning Himalayan
community in Queens
and Brooklyn.
Kaufman said recording
the languages is the
easy part.
“Real language documentation
involves a lot of transcription,
translation and
grammatical analysis,” explained
Kaufman, who plans
to create a public repository
for all the language material
collected through his Queens
College lab. In addition, he is
committed to understanding
what happens to these groups
in New York. “What aids them
or prevents them from using
their languages here?” he
asks. “Do they face discrimination
for using their languages?
Do various dialects
of a language blend with each
other in the city, as we might
expect in a melting pot?”
Read more at QNS.com.
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