/ulemap

Urban Language Ecology

To create a spatial definition of language health and endangerment

Introduction

In 2014, the United Nations found that over 54% of the world's population lived in cities. In the intervening years, that proportion has only increased. This mass urbanization has led to important social, cultural, and linguistic changes in the lives of people worldwide. While cities may now hold more linguistic and cultural diversity than ever before, many of the languages and cultures are vulnerable once they enter the city. In urban areas, a handful of "superlanguages" such as English, Mandarin, Spanish, Arabic, French, and a few others have become their own currency, where proficiency in one of these languages ensures economic and social opportunities unavailable otherwise. Oftentimes, these languages also serve as a lingua franca, allowing speakers of different languages to communicate, cross borders and boundaries. While knowledge of one of these super languages opens the doors to economic and social opportunities inaccessible otherwise, they also pose a threat to the non-dominant languages urban migrants may have spoken before.

Yet, in theory, cities can also be sites of use and preservation of less-dominant languages as they provide spaces for diasporic communities to form and thrive. Situated in discourses about endangered languages and drawing on social network theory, public policy, and language planning, this project seeks to identify the factors that promote the maintenance of a language community in urban areas. Assuming that languages thrive when they are meaningfully useful to their speakers, this project shifts from a generational definition of language endangerment to a spatial one.

Research Questions

  • To what extent do institutions/businesses/organized social structures support the maintenance of non-dominant languages?
  • Are formal or informal institutions more valuable in the preservation of linguistic communities in urban areas?
  • To what extent can language planning and urban planning stem the loss of vulnerable languages?

Research Plan

Literature Areas

  • Language Endangerment
  • Language Revitalization
  • Plurilingual Cities
  • Institutional Networks
  • Role of public and private spaces in community health
  • Urban Planning
  • Language Planning

Clarify

  • Language (vs. dialect)
  • Speech community
  • Why using a language beyond the household matters
  • Formal vs. Informal institutions

Data

  • NYC Languages data

    • Cleaned & orgnaized
    • Plotted

  • Census

    • Every year going back to 1980. This will be messy, but would like to see it over time.
    • Geojson of every year at the finest granularity (space & time) we can get.

Analysis

  1. Focus first on the languages that have significantly grown or declined over the past 37 years in different areas of the city.

    1. What language-based spaces existed?
    2. Is there a correlation?

  2. Do sites of language use cluster?

    1. Nearby languages?
    2. Language families?
    3. Is this pattern replicated in any other cities (i.e., Urdu and Hindi in the same area of Queens

  3. Are there multilingual hotspots in New York City?

    1. Why? Transportation? Rent? Social Networks? Work?

Next steps

Paper

  1. Prepare summaries of each literature area
  2. Clarify RQ's
  3. Justify analysis steps
  4. Define formal versus informal

Project

  1. Census

    1. Download and organize census data
    2. Census maps for each year (vectors & rasters)
    3. Layer the NYC-LD over the census map
    4. Calculate change over time within proximity to institutions
    5. Animate this change for 5 different languages
    6. Layer these animations onto one map (5 colors)

  2. Institutions

    1. Clean NYC Language Data
    2. Plot NYC-LD
    3. Look for any patterns