2024 British Academy Book Prize

'Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues' by Ross Perlin was named the 12th winner of the British Academy Book Prize on 22 October.

The announcement was made by the Chair of judges, Professor Charles Tripp FBA, at a celebration at the British Academy.

'Of the world’s approximately 7000 languages – not counting all the dialects, sociolects, ethnolects, religiolects, and local varieties – up to half are likely to disappear over the next few centuries. Languages are being lost every year. The least documented are the most threatened. Few nonspeakers have heard of them, and most are used by only the smallest and most marginalized groups: just 4 per cent of the world’s population now speaks 96 per cent of the world’s languages. The situation is even more dire for the approximately 200 sign languages. Hundreds of entire language families (groups of historically related languages, typically reaching back thousands of years) are also likely to be lost.

This book is about the most linguistically diverse city in the history of the world: its past, present, and future. Now home to over 700 languages, early 21st century New York City is especially a last improbable refuge for embattled and endangered languages. Never before have cities like New York been so linguistically various, and they may never be again, but this new hyperdiversity has hardly been mapped, let alone understood or supported. In particular, in just the last few decades, hundreds of thousands of people speaking hundreds of languages have arrived in New York from heavily minority and Indigenous zones of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. At the very moment when languages worldwide are disappearing at an unprecedented rate, many of the last speakers are on the move. Far from being confined to remote islands, towering mountains, or impenetrable jungles, they are now right next door, though to majority groups they remain invisible and their words inaudible. Theirs are the stories that intersect on Eighteenth Street and form the core of this book.'

- Excerpt from 'Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues' (Grove Press UK, 2024), pp. 4-5. All rights reserved.

New York City is home to more than 700 languages – ‘the most linguistically diverse city in the history of the world’ – and by examining them, Perlin opens out new ways of thinking about the exuberant variety of these aspects of the urban soundscape, which we might otherwise take for granted or ignore.

- Professor Charles Tripp FBA, Chair of judges

'Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues' by Ross Perlin (Grove Press UK)

'Language City' offers a portrait of contemporary New York City through six remarkable yet ordinary speakers of little-known languages. Perlin recounts the unique history of immigration that shaped New York and dives deep into these six speakers’ communities to learn how they are maintaining and reviving their languages against overwhelming linguistic loss. Perlin also invites us to a fascinating tour of unusual grammars, rare sounds, and powerful cultural histories from all around the world.

Half of all 7000-plus human languages may disappear over the next century and – because many have never been recorded – when they’re gone, it will be forever. Seke is spoken by 700 people from five ancestral villages in Nepal, 100 of whom have lived in a single Brooklyn apartment building. N’ko is a radical new West African writing system now going global in Harlem and the Bronx. After centuries of colonisation and displacement, Lenape, the city’s original indigenous language and the source of the name Manhattan ('the place where we get bows'), has just one fluent native speaker, bolstered by a small band of revivalists. Also profiled in the book are speakers of the indigenous Mexican language Nahuatl, the Central Asian minority language Wakhi, and the former lingua franca of the Lower East Side, Yiddish.

A century after the anti-immigration Johnson-Reed Act closed America’s doors for decades and on the 400th anniversary of New York’s colonial founding, Perlin raises the alarm about growing political threats and the onslaught of 'killer languages' like English and Spanish. Both remarkable social history and testament to the importance of linguistic diversity, 'Language City' is a joyful and illuminating exploration of a city and the world that made it.

Ross Perlin is a linguist, writer, and translator. Since 2013 he has co-directed the Endangered Language Alliance, a non-profit dedicated to documenting Indigenous, minority, and endangered languages. He has written for the New York Times, the Guardian, Harper’s, and n+1, and the Endangered Language Alliance has been covered by the New York Times, the New Yorker, BBC, NPR, and many others. He is also the author of 'Intern Nation: How to Learn Nothing and Earn Little in the Brave New Economy' (2011). Perlin was a New Arizona Fellow at New America and is a native New Yorker.

Six rigorously researched non-fiction books that promote the public understanding of world cultures

'Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future' by Ed Conway (WH Allen / Ebury Publishing / Penguin Random House)

Salt, Iron, Copper, Oil, Sand and Lithium. The struggle for these tiny, magical materials has razed empires, demolished civilisations, fed our greed and our ingenuity for thousands of years. But the story is not over. We are often told we now live in a weightless world of information but in fact we dug more stuff out of the earth in 2017 than in all of human history before 1950. And it's getting worse.

To make one bar of gold, we now have to dig 5000 tons of earth. For every tonne of fossil fuels, we extract six tonnes of other materials - from sand to stone to wood to metal. Even as we pare back our consumption of fossil fuels we have redoubled our consumption of everything else. Why? Because these ingredients build everything. They power our computers and phones, build our homes and offices, print our books and packaging. Our modern world would not exist without them, and the hidden battle to control them will shape our future.

Ed Conway is the Economics and Data Editor of Sky News and has been a regular columnist for the Times and the Sunday Times. He has won numerous awards for his television and newspaper journalism, among them the 2018 Wincott Foundation Journalist of the Year Award.

He is the author of the critically acclaimed book on Bretton Woods, 'The Summit: The Biggest Battle of the Second World War – Fought Behind Closed Doors' (Little, Brown, 2014) and the bestselling '50 Economics Ideas You Really Need to Know' (Quercus, 2009). Ed studied at Pembroke College, Oxford and the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, where he was a Fulbright scholar and a Shorenstein Scholar.

'Smoke and Ashes: Opium's Hidden Histories' by Amitav Ghosh (John Murray / HarperCollins India)

'Smoke and Ashes' is at once a travelogue, a memoir and an excursion into history, both economic and cultural. Ghosh traces the transformative effect the opium trade had on Britain, India and China, as well as on the world at large. Engineered by the British Empire, which exported opium from India to sell in China, the trade and its revenues were essential to the Empire’s survival. Upon deeper exploration, Ghosh finds opium at the origins of some of the world’s biggest corporations, several of America’s most powerful families and institutions, and contemporary globalism itself. In India, the long-term consequences were even more profound.

Moving deftly between horticultural histories, the mythologies of capitalism and the social and cultural repercussions of colonialism, 'Smoke and Ashes' reveals the pivotal role one small plant has played in the making of the world as we know – a world that is now teetering on the edge of catastrophe.

Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta, and grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka; he studied in Delhi, Oxford and Alexandria. He is the author of several acclaimed works of fiction and non-fiction including 'The Shadow Lines', 'The Glass Palace', 'The Hungry Tide', the Ibis Trilogy (comprising the novels 'Sea of Poppies', 'River of Smoke' and 'Flood of Fire'), 'Gun Island', 'The Great Derangement', 'The Nutmeg’s Curse', 'Jungle Nama' and 'The Living Mountain'.

Amitav Ghosh’s work has been translated into more than 30 languages. He has been awarded and felicitated across the world. In 2019, Foreign Policy magazine named him one of the most important global thinkers of the past decade. The same year, the Jnanpith Award, India’s highest literary honour, was conferred on him: he was the first English-language writer to receive it.

'The Secret Lives of Numbers: A Global History of Mathematics & Its Unsung Trailblazers' by Kate Kitagawa and Timothy Revell (Viking / Penguin Random House)

Mathematics shapes almost everything we do. But despite its reputation as the study of fundamental truths, the stories we have been told about it are wrong. In 'The Secret Lives of Numbers', historian Kate Kitagawa and journalist Timothy Revell introduce readers to the mathematical boundary-smashers who have been erased by history because of their race, gender or nationality.

From the brilliant Arabic scholars of the 9th-century House of Wisdom, and the pioneering African American mathematicians of the 20th century, to the 'lady computers' around the world who revolutionised our knowledge of the night sky, we meet these fascinating trailblazers and see how they contributed to our global knowledge today.

Along the way, the mathematics itself is explained extremely clearly, for example, calculus is described using the authors' home baking as they pose the question: how much cake is in our cake? This revisionist, completely accessible and radically inclusive history of mathematics is as entertaining as it is important.

Dr Kate Kitagawa is one of the world's leading experts on the history of mathematics. She earned a PhD from Princeton University, taught history at Harvard University and conducted research in the UK, Germany and South Africa.

Her first book was a national bestseller in Japan, and she has been named one of the 100 most influential people in Japan by Nikkei Business. She is currently Director of the Space Education Office at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). Kate lives in Japan.

Dr Timothy Revell is a journalist and lapsed mathematician. He is currently the Deputy US Editor for the New Scientist. As a reporter and editor, he specialises in technology and mathematics, covering everything from artificial intelligence to the Abel Prize.

He appears regularly on WNYC's 'Science Friday', as well as on other podcasts and radio to talk about the latest developments in science. He has a master's degree in Mathematics and a PhD in Computer Science. His first book was 'Man vs. Maths'. Tim is based in the UK.

'The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals after 1492' by Marcy Norton (Harvard University Press)

A dramatic new interpretation of the encounter between Europe and the Americas that reveals the crucial role of animals in the shaping of the modern world.

When the men and women of the island of Guanahani first made contact with Christopher Columbus and his crew on 12 October 1492, the cultural differences between the two groups were vaster than the oceans that had separated them. There is perhaps no better demonstration than the divide in their respective ways of relating to animals. In 'The Tame and the Wild', Marcy Norton tells a new history of the colonisation of the Americas, one that places wildlife and livestock at the centre of the story. She reveals that the encounters between European and Native American beliefs about animal life transformed societies on both sides of the Atlantic.

Europeans’ strategies and motives for conquest were inseparable from the horses that carried them in military campaigns and the dogs they deployed to terrorise Native peoples. Even more crucial were the sheep, cattle, pigs, and chickens whose flesh became food and whose skins became valuable commodities. Yet, as central as the domestication of animals was to European plans in the Americas, Native peoples’ own practices around animals proved just as crucial in shaping the world after 1492. Cultures throughout the Caribbean, Amazonia, and Mexico were deeply invested in familiarisation: the practice of capturing wild animals – not only parrots and monkeys but even tapir, deer, and manatee – and turning some of them into 'companion species'.

These taming practices not only influenced the way Indigenous people responded to human and nonhuman intruders but also transformed European culture itself, paving the way for both zoological science and the modern pet.

Marcy Norton is Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of the award-winning 'Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World' (2008).

'Divided: Racism, Medicine and Why We Need to Decolonise Healthcare' by Annabel Sowemimo (Profile Books / Wellcome Collection)

In the wake of the pandemic and with an NHS in crisis, we are all too aware of the urgent health inequalities that plague our world. But these inequalities have always been urgent: modern medicine has a colonial and racist history.

Here, in an essential and searingly truthful account combining data, history and interviews, writer, campaigner and NHS doctor, Annabel Sowemimo unravels the colonial roots of modern medicine. Tackling systemic racism, hidden histories and healthcare myths, Sowemimo recounts her own experiences as a physician, patient and activist.

'Divided' exposes the racial biases of medicine that affect our everyday lives and provides an illuminating – and incredibly necessary – insight into how our world works, and who it works for. This book will reshape how we see health and medicine – forever.

Annabel Sowemimo was born and grew up in London and is a registrar in sexual and reproductive health currently working in a clinic in Leicester. She also runs the charity Reproductive Justice Initiative which aims to educate and empower specifically BPOC in sexual health matters of all kinds. She is currently working on a PhD at King’s College London (KCL) and teaches at KCL, University College London (UCL) and the London School of Tropical Medicine as well as speaking on all of these matters in the media.