A Day Spent in a Modern Babel

Tracing Linguistic Lineages in New York City

In my day-to-day life, I have known no other language than English. I can speak and understand some Hindi, but I remember the day I refused to learn my mother-tongue. I was sitting in my first class of Hindi Sunday school in a dark classroom on a slanted desk. My workbook lay unopened before me as the foreign sounds swirled formidably in the air. I felt alone, alienated in a world that was supposed to be mine. As a child, I never understood the importance of spending a few hours each Sunday learning the language of my parents, and their parents, and their parents. So on and so forth.

But I walked away from all that, albeit unknowingly.

Whenever I visit India, my American accent bleeds through my speech as I try to converse with my grandparents. At grocery stores, the mall, and the tailor shop, I am subject to an acute pain of not being able to speak our shared language. But, as soon as the airplane touches the SFO airport tarmac, I’m back in the world of English and have no external cue to try to speak the words that lay dormant in my mind.

What I have is English, the plant that has taken root, the tree that is hard to fell. I have nothing against the language. It’s been the medium for all my life. But, I’ve realized the quiet damage it has wreaked on my world. English, with its deathly scythe, has uprooted words and meaning from other languages for centuries. Ever since European ships touched “new” shores, they found ways to eradicate languages and by extension, their cultures.

In New York City, I heard and saw other languages besides English. The few days we spent in the city were enough to find a new lexicon, scattered across restaurant menus, train signs, and posters. The constant chattering of the city was in a thousand different voices, all speaking the tongues they were most familiar with.

The differences manifested themselves beautifully:

In the muggy heat of the subway platform, schedules flashed in red print on black screens in English and Spanish. These numbers and place names shone like stars, alerting passengers of arriving and departing trains, reaching more people than just English-speakers. Once we had boarded, as we zipped past ornate signs of stations written in English, I read ads in multiple languages advertising an education program. The words were unfamiliar, but I gleaned the meaning nonetheless. Translation was unnecessary. Famous neighborhoods like Chinatown and Koreatown were clear centers of multilingual signs. Everything from restaurants to banks were primarily communicated in the language of the neighborhood’s occupants. You could spend blocks reading one language, but on the next street, everything would rematerialize but in new symbols and letters. In Morningside Park near the Columbia campus, a large orange banner encouraged visitors to take care of the grounds both in Spanish and English. As we kept walking, we ran into the visitors guide, which was written in English, Spanish, and Chinese.

Every street corner we encountered was like turning a new page in a book. This book, this city, was special. It wasn’t written by a singular author. New York captures a unique moment in history; there will likely never be this kind of linguistic diversity in one place ever again. Dialects are disappearing at an alarming rate (Carp 2024).

From the two fast-paced, whirlwind days of our Caravan trip, I already sensed that New York was a place of many languages. But, I eagerly awaited my conversation with Eleanor Bullock, the founder of GAMAE International, to understand the reality of linguistic diversity – and its disappearance. GAMAE, Garifuna Arts, Medicine, Agriculture, and Education, is an organization Eleanor and her colleagues worked hard to build over the years. GAMAE promotes unity and economic opportunities within the Garifuna communities, a group of people spread across Central America. GAMAE focuses its efforts on the Garifuna in Southern Belize.

Eleanor wore traditional Garifuna colors, yellow and black. Her wrists clinked with golden bangles as she adjusted her shawl around her shoulders. In a Penn Station coffee shop, the bright lights shone against the waxy coffee table, and a 2010 hits playlist blared over the speakers.

Through our conversation, Eleanor traced how Garifuna, her native language and culture, ended up in New York City and highlighted the efforts to preserve the language inside and outside the United States. Her people are called the Garinagu, speakers of the Garifuna language. Passed through generations of family, including Eleanor and her grandmother, the story began in St. Vincent in the Caribbean, a place where different groups of people interacted. The Garifuna people began here, but were soon exiled by European imperialists.

“The Europeans, British, would shoot them to death right away if they heard them speak their Garifuna language,” Eleanor said. This is sadly a common story, one I’ve heard echoed in many places from French Polynesia to India.

Rounded up and moved from island to island, the Garifuna people were abandoned again and again, holding onto their language and culture as much as possible. The seeds of language had begun to scatter across coordinates, needing a place to find roots. Finally, they settled in Belize, making their home in the country’s coastal areas.

The story, and language, has touched many parts of the world from Africa to Central America. “[My grandmother] spoke it to us, and she made us answer her in Garifuna, because that is how you teach your children how to speak the language, especially when they're small,” Eleanor emphasized. Writing the Garifuna language on paper is a relatively new practice. While Eleanor writes Garifuna words phonetically, her colleagues have more traditional linguistic approaches.

This constant movement, the dispersal of people across waters shows the hardiness of the Garifuna language, and its community. Words had to have been constantly shared and remembered.

“I promote, preserve and protect our Garifuna language by teaching it to children.” Eleanor emphasized the necessity of passing on her knowledge to young people through art. The language takes on a new body through music and dance and becomes accessible to younger audiences. I could feel Eleanor’s passion for her art as she talked about her original choreographies and her years of teaching Garifuna dance.

“Read, read, read about your people” is what her late husband told Eleanor as she began to immerse herself in her culture after college. Eleanor also spoke of her children: “They're amazed when they hear our language. I have tried to from the time I started reading about my history and learned about the language.” My mind cast back to that fateful day in Hindi Sunday school. What if I had stayed?

But I thought about all the ways a language is kept alive. It’s in the myths of Indian gods and goddesses my grandmother told me before bed. It’s in the names of the foods on the dinner table at Diwali, the festival of lights. It’s in the nickname my parents kept for me ever since I was little. Though I would have benefited greatly from a formal education in Hindi, it has made its way into my life. It pushed through the hard Earth, unrelenting. It is an undercurrent of who I am. One day, I might feel the words bloom from my lips as they were always meant to. I could go about my parents’ homeland: untranslated, unaltered, unhidden.

I could feel that in New York. English was just on the surface. Underneath was everyone talking to their families and friends in the words they know best. Everyone gets by on a day to day basis with English, but in the places where people eat or meet or travel, unique languages come up for air, like wildflowers sweeping over a field. Languages are so much more than the word structure or grammar; they’re vessels of meaning, and New York is full of it.

We found meaning in the menus written in their original dialects. The dishes were presented exactly as they were created with the same names they’d always possessed.

We found meaning in the way silence was filled by everyone’s music: classic American synth pop, the deep hums of jazz, the upbeat pace of a Spanish song.

I found great meaning in Eleanor’s story: the tenacity of her language, culture, and people.

When our conversation ended, Eleanor shared her plans to move back to Belize to continue her work there. She also shared that GAMAE is seeking commercial musicians to collaborate with.

“I’m going home,” Eleanor said. “I'm hoping that your article will help us find people who are willing to help us keep and preserve our language.”

Words: Sia Agarwal

Photos: Montserrat Urbina, Waverly Choy, Kyle Garcia Takata

Design: Khankamol Chor Kongrukgreatiyos (Jan)