Perlin observes that up to half of the world’s 7,000 languages are likely to die over the next few centuries. But the book isn’t a sob-story for threatened languages so much as collection of case studies on how displaced people rebuild their lives in a place where half the residents speak a language other than English at home.

A New York Times Book Review has this to say about Language City; “Throughout Perlin never misses the chance to reinforce a key point: The history of New York’s lesser-known languages is also that of the traumas of many speakers. Some fled genocide (as in the cases of Western Armenian and Judeo-Greek), others mass deportation (languages of the North Caucuses), racial violence (Gullah, an English-based Creole) or starvation (Irish). Linguistic minorities “have been overrepresented in diaspora,” Perlin points out, because they are “hit hardest by conflict, catastrophe and privation and thus impelled to leave.”