New Jersey’s population speaks a wide variety of languages. Many of them are endangered. Each dialect has its own unique perspective on the world, said Ross Perlin, co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance in New York. ‘A language’s complexity, its texture, its character cannot be translated,’ he said.
Losing a language also has a cost for its speakers, said Charles Häberl, chair of Rutgers University’s Department of African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literatures. ‘When people … get separated from their cultures,’ Häberl said, ‘it seems to take a psychological toll’. A third of New Jersey’s population speaks a language other than English, according to the US Census. Only three other U.S. states have a higher share of non-English speakers.
In the northern part of the state, that variety is especially pronounced. Two-thirds of the people in a dozen towns speak a language other than English. Spanish is the second-most popular language in Oregon, but a sizable number of people still only speak English. However, these categories hide many lesser-known languages: Aramaic, Basque, Ladino, Mam, Garifuna, Scottish Gaelic and Kalmyk. As recently as last year, hospitals far away from the state’s major cities like the Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in Hamilton needed translators who knew 32 languages, according to a hospital spokeswoman.
Spotlight: Mam
According to Bartolo Vail, a Guatemalan immigrant in Morristown, about a thousand people still speak Mam, the Maya language. ‘It is my language, the language of the people,’ Vail said in Spanish. While Central America is known for its Spanish, many indigenous groups still speak pre-colonial languages such as K’iche’ and Kaqchikel. Several of these species, including Mam, are threatened even in Guatemala, prompting local groups to launch literacy programs. According to the US Department of Justice, immigration from Central America has also increased the demand for Mam translators in U.S. immigration courts.
Aramaic: Spotlight
‘It’s our identity,’ said Saliba Kassis, a priest at the Mor Aphrem Center in Paramus. The use of Aramaic is decreasing, Kassis said, but thousands of people in the area still speak it. Originally from the Middle East, Aramaic is similar to Hebrew. Since it was spoken in first-century Palestine, you can hear Jim Caviezel use it in 2004’s ‘The Passion of the Christ’.
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Kalmyk: Spotlight
Howell’s website dedicates a significant amount of its history to the Kalmyks, an ethnic group with deep Mongolian and Russian roots. Sanderson, a lay leader at a Buddhist temple in Howell who married an ethnic Kalmyk, estimates that only a few hundred people in the area speak the language fluently. After her mother passed away, his wife was left with no one she could speak Kalmyk with on a daily basis.
Kalmyk was also the language spoken by the Teddy Bear-like Ewoks in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi. According to Ross Perlin, president of the Endangered Language Alliance in New York, New Jersey lacks a similar group to record and preserve the state’s linguistic diversity. Perlin explained that there is no such organization in the state.
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