New York, where languages go to live

Husni Husain, who lives in Queens, speaks Mamuju, the rare language he learned growing up in the Indonesian province of West Sulawesi. Husain, 67, has nobody to talk to in Mamuju, not even his wife or children.

New York is the most linguistically diverse city in the world. Languages from every corner of the world are now more commonly heard in parts of New York than anywhere else. Some experts believe the city is home to as many as 800 languages.

"It is the capital of language density in the world", Daniel Kaufman, a professor of linguistics at the City University of New York, told The New York Times. He says that the chances of overhearing a conversation in Vlashki, a variant of Istro-Romanian, are greater in Queens than in the Croatia that immigrants now living in New York left years ago.

To keep all those voices alive, Kaufman has helped start the Endangered Language Alliance, to identify and record dying languages, many of which have no written alphabet, and encourage native speakers to teach them.