I remember hearing a lot about the great NYC Yiddish community with its bands, literature and movies. They always mentioned isaac Bashevis Singer, who wrote the agony column and won a Nobel prize for literature, and Molly Picon, who crossed over from the Yiddish cinema to Hollywood. My parents were both native speakers who learned English on the street. It always seems amazing that there was an entire world with printing presses, books, newspapers, movie studios, radio stations, actors and actresses, billboards, and assholes yelling in the street, all in what is now effectively a dead language. Even stranger is that to them, Hebrew was a dead language, a liturgical language like Latin or Old Church Slavonic, but now Hebrew is a living language, evolving and changing again.

BBC recently had an article on my old neighborhood, Jackson Heights, where languages come to die. I wonder if future generations, descended from immigrants today, will be remembering the old Hindi streets signs and video stores or waxing nostalgic as a cache of MP3s in the old tongue are rediscovered.

If I was staying in town, I’d almost start a boingboing meetup…