The Robert A. and Elizabeth R. Jeffe Distinguished Lecture in Urban History: Language City
A distinguished lecture at the Museum of the City of New York on how immigrants, dialects, and linguistic diversity shaped the city's identity.
Why we picked this
New York is home to more languages than any other city on earth. This lecture explores how that fact shaped the city itself — its neighborhoods, its politics, its identity.
New York City is home to more than 700 languages — more than any other city on the planet. This distinguished lecture at the Museum of the City of New York examines how linguistic diversity has been a defining force in the city’s development, shaping everything from neighborhood boundaries to political coalitions to the texture of daily life.
The Jeffe Distinguished Lecture in Urban History is one of the museum’s flagship intellectual programs, placing a single speaker at the intersection of scholarship and civic storytelling. This edition focuses on how waves of immigration have continually remade the city’s soundscape and what the ongoing loss of endangered languages means for New York’s future.
An evening for anyone who has noticed that their subway car contains a dozen languages at once and wondered what that says about where we live.