Due to environmental, economic, and social factors, cities are increasingly absorbing speakers of endangered languages. In this chapter, the authors examine some of the ways that organizations can work with communities in an urban setting to further language documentation, conservation, and revitalization. They base their discussion on their experience at the Endangered Language Alliance, a non-profit organization based in New York City that facilitates collaboration between linguists, students, speakers of endangered languages, and other relevant parties. While ex-situ language documentation has not been given much attention in the literature, they argue that it has its own unique advantages and that diaspora communities need to be taken seriously, both to fully understand language endangerment and to better counteract it.
The suicide nets are still there. Foxconn, the giant electronics manufacturing subcontractor, installed them in 2010, a year when fourteen workers died after jumping from the ledges and windows of crowded dormitories. In addition to the wide mesh nets, stretched low over the streets of Foxconn's company towns, the corporation has twenty-four-hour "care centers," "no suicide agreements," and a psychological test to screen out potentially suicidal workers, charged to the job applicant. It has raised wages signifi cantly, but only in the face of runaway inflation, steep hikes in the minimum wage, and mounting worker unrest. Media attention and pressure from Apple, one of its main customers, backed up by a program of regular factory audits, seem to be driving incremental improvements in working conditions.
Occupy Wall Street's tiny Zuccotti Park inspired a global archipelago of Occupy offshoots (including a small but long-lived encampment in Hong Kong), but Turkey’s Occupy Gezi and Hong Kong’s more recent Occupy movement mark an inflection point. Sustained, fiercely local mass movements are tapping into and extending a new global language of protest. Both in Turkey and in China, fearmongers and propagandists blamed malicious foreign influences for the protests, but the reality is less sinister and more significant. Occupy is serving as an open-source template for dissent, a transparent and adaptable playbook for organizing global movements with diverse aims and values. By turns autonomous and hyperconnected, the template is an uncanny fit for our precarious, plugged-in life.
as diasporic Tibetans from India and culturally Tibetan regions in China, have settled into lives as New Yorkers, their senses of identity have begun to transform. Language plays a central role in these transformations. Himalayan voices can now be heard in the already hyperdiverse sociolinguistic landscape of a place like Jackson Heights. 1 Yet the processes of migration and assimilation have created new challenges for maintaining language diversity and cultivating a sense of social belonging through language. How are Himalayan New Yorkers finding a sense of community, navigating new transnational and intergenerational cultural dynamics, and responding to the relationship between "home" and being "over here" in New York? And what does language have to do with this? These questions have guided a collaborative research project, Voices of the Himalaya: Language, Culture, and Belonging in Immigrant New York. Using the medium of video interviews, this project explores the lived experiences of migration and social change between the greater Himalayan region and New York City. The project has brought together a team of scholars and social activists, with expertise in linguistics, anthropology, and community-based participatory research (including the creation of digital archives), toward the production and curation of accessible narratives
No abstract
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
customersupport@researchsolutions.com
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Copyright © 2025 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.