Fifteen years ago, UNESCO classified Jejueo, the language of Korea’s Jeju Island, as “critically endangered,” entering it into the Atlas of World’s Languages in Danger. At that time, they estimated 5,000 to 10,000 fluent speakers remained. All were likely over the age of 75. Scholars Yang Chang-yong, Yang Se-jung and William O’Grady estimate that the number is closer to “far less than 1,000” fluent speakers today. That’s a sobering thought.

The precarious decline of Jejueo highlights a global trend of language extinction. In his book "Language City," linguist Ross Perlin, the co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, takes us on a journey to New York City, another epicenter of this crisis, where he examines the fight to preserve mother tongues. Like many Americans, Perlin started life as a monolingual but descended from Yiddish speakers. Coincidentally, his introduction to endangered languages came in the East, specifically Beijing, while studying Mandarin Chinese. He first heard of endangered languages from the famed linguist Sun Hongkai, who’s documented as many of the 300 languages as possible throughout greater China. A linguist’s census of and love letter to New York, a Tower of Babel with over 700 languages, his book is a freewheeling, exuberant, exhilarating, rapid-fire and garrulous tour of this “polyglot port of minority peoples.” (New York is “the most linguistically diverse city in the history of the world,” Perlin claims grandiloquently. Call it the American prerogative, this propensity to heavily exaggerate). In addition to capturing the city’s linguistic past and present, he........

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