Unexpected languages turn up all over. Daniel Kaufman, another of the ELA’s codirectors, learned some Tagalog (a language of the Philippines) from a man he played speed chess with in Washington Square Park. At the bodega across West 18th Street from the ELA’s offices in Manhattan, one of the cashiers speaks Ghale, “a little-documented language of Nepal,” and the guy behind the deli counter speaks Poqomchi’, a Mayan language from Guatemala. Of course these employees also know English; speakers of small languages become multilingual by necessity.
Ian Frazier is great, and this is a fun essay-review, but it’s pretty strange to have Tagalog, a language spoken by a couple of million Americans, lumped in with two “small” — presumably this means “little-spoken” — languages. Tagalog shouldn’t be “unexpected” in any large American city. Heck, I’ve heard it spoken in Waco.
