In the debut episode of Lit NYC, the FAQ NYC Podcast Network's off-cycle show covering books, art, music and more, you'll be hearing from Ross Perlin, author of the brilliant Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues, and co-director of the Endangered Languages Alliance.

He sat down at the Alliance's office in Manhattan to talk with Haidee Chu, Queens reporter for The City and a native Cantonese speaker, and monolingual Harry Siegel, to discuss his work mapping the languages spoken here in what may be the most linguistically diverse city in the history of the world, why our melting pot is also a threat to some of those languages, and much more.