A Great Place for Spies

Decades ago when we all worried about Soviet spies, one often was told that New York was a great place for them to hide in the open, and speak Russian. For it was on any corner of New York that one could hear any tongue spoken on the planet and not be surprised. It was here that I learned my Italian, which decades later I tried in Florence to be told rather bluntly that I sounded like some Mafia character from Sicily, yet after all I learned it on Staten Island.

Then my Spanish, from the subway, the signs, the guys I ran with, boxed with, but in Spain they had no idea what I was saying, it was Puerto Rican, yet to me it was just plain Spanish. Then for my Russian, Jimmy Bula, a fellow lifeguard, from Ukraine, we sat and I tried my best to learn the Cyrillic and the words, Jerry helped, then when in Russia they asked where in Ukraine did I come from?

Now the BBC has an interesting piece on New York having some hundreds of languages spoken, and some spoken no where else.

Home to around 800 different languages, New York is a delight for linguists, but also provides a rich hunting ground for those trying to document languages threatened with extinction.\

To hear the many languages of New York, just board the subway.

The number 7 line, which leads from Flushing in Queens to Times Square in the heart of Manhattan takes you on a journey which would thrill the heart of a linguistic anthropologist.

Each stop along the line takes you into a different linguistic universe - Korean, Chinese, Spanish, Bengali, Gujarati, Nepali.

And it is not just the language spoken on the streets that changes.

Street signs and business names are also transformed, even those advertising the services of major multinational banks or hotel chains.

In the subway, the information signs warning passengers to avoid the electrified rails are written in seven different languages. 

 The A train has most signs in Spanish, then go China town and even the street signs are in Chinese. I had a Russian partner who had been stationed in Argentina for a period, and surprisingly in a restaurant he was able to speak fluently with the help, and that made dinner perfect. And of course, any Diner in New York is a Greek Restaurant. Try my Greek there and get a free desert, and a long story about a cousin or two.

As for the Number 7 line, I took it for years, traveling to East 54th St to my swimming or boxing sessions, and learning a few more words in one language or another. New York allows Spanglish, or any combination of multiple languages. After all, having just 100 words allows one to survive anywhere.

But at the base of it was those years of Latin. One learned that language had structure, present, past, future, and that if one grasped these concepts then one could "communicate" albeit at a rudimentary manner.

Yet strangely the one place where I have always had the mos difficulty was England, the words are often the same but the accents are tonal, not the flat atonal American English, and the accents vary so much that it takes quite a while for many to be comprehensible. Thus in a sense New York can spoil one, you can be a sloppy learner, but you may often learn that dialect then may not travel that well. Then again there is French in Paris, I have learned that no one but a native born Parisian could ever master it, perhaps that is why English, sloppy as it is, survives so well.