In today's Rising Voices Language Blog, we speak with Jennifer Qi, a sophomore from Duke University and a youth advocate and researcher whose work spans from the streets of Jackson Heights in New York to the bamboo gardens of Beijing. She shares how her work bridges language, identity, and activism — and what it truly means to "see."
1. Could you start by telling us a bit about the languages you've worked on and why they became endangered?
Jennifer: I've mainly worked on preserving two endangered linguistic identities. In New York City, I helped document dialects of Dominican Spanish, particularly from Jackson Heights—a region known for its immigrant diversity. There, I discovered speakers whose dialect revealed rare 17th-century colonial Spanish features, such as end-contractions and unique consonant mergers. However, due to gentrification and assimilation, these dialects are vanishing rapidly, often within one generation. I also worked on a Chinese folk dance project that incorporated Nuosu, an endangered Tibeto-Burman language spoken by the Yi people in China. The language carries spiritual weight, woven into rituals and oral traditions. Sadly, it's disappearing as younger generations migrate and shift toward Mandarin.
2. Why do you think it's important to preserve this language today?
Jennifer: Language is the spiritual DNA of a culture. It shapes how we perceive the world, mourn, celebrate, and remember. When a language dies, we lose an entire way of seeing. Preserving these languages honors the lives and stories of those who came before—like city graffiti or the Nuosu people's prayers. In an increasingly homogenized world, linguistic preservation is a radical act of respect, empathy, and resistance.
3. Can you tell us more about the work you've done to help preserve or revive the language?
Jennifer: In the summer of 2023, I worked as a field research assistant for a linguistics professor at Columbia University, recording dialect samples in Jackson Heights, a multilingual neighborhood in northern New York City. I helped contribute these recordings to 13 public linguistic databases. I also authored a paper on dialect geography, analyzing both the structural variation of Dominican Spanish and the cultural erosion it faces in the local community. Inspired by Lin-Manuel Miranda's musical In The Heights, I adapted my interviewee's story into a musical performance, which I organized and performed at my school in China for an audience of over 2,000 people.
Later, after learning about endangered minority languages in southeastern China, I combined my 14 years of experience in Chinese dance with linguistic storytelling. I filmed a dance piece titled The Red Dragonfly—based on traditional Yi ethnic choreography—set in a bamboo garden in Beijing. The work intertwined the Nuosu (Yi) language with religious mythology and garnered over 10,000 online views, sparking dialogue around cultural disappearance and language preservation.
In addition, I became aware of the complex linguistic and cultural backgrounds of faculty members at my school. Along with a friend, I co-founded a literary magazine where teachers could share their experiences of being treated differently due to their accents. Through these efforts, I strive to create an environment where linguistic vulnerability is not hidden, but respected and voiced.
4. What inspired you to get involved in this work in the first place?
Jennifer: What drew me into this work wasn't just academic fascination with phonetic shifts or semantic patterns—it was the people behind the languages, and the systems that rendered them invisible.
In Jackson Heights, I met a Dominican immigrant whose accent bore the imprints of centuries of colonial conquest, forced migrations, and institutional neglect. His voice wasn't just a dialectal variation—it was a historical record. I listened to his story, but more than that, I saw the silence designed around him—the silence left by gentrification policies, economic displacement, and cultural erasure disguised as modernization.
I've always admired the Chinese journalist Chai Jing. She once said, "What matters is not whether you speak loudly, but whether you have seen." Language loss is not simply a linguistic process—it is a political one. It accumulates through every moment when a planner redraws urban boundaries, when an educator deprioritizes minority instruction, when a market rewards homogenization over heritage. I wanted to be someone who chooses to see—and then stays. Who resists the comfort of abstraction and faces the discomfort of reality. For me, language preservation is not about freezing a tongue in time; it is about resisting the forces that decide whose voice is worth recording, and whose can fade quietly.
Later, when I choreographed a dance to honor the Yi people's story—a people displaced by development yet still praying to their sky deity—I realized that the truest form of respect is not romanticization, but truth-telling. Even when those truths are economically inconvenient, politically sidelined, or culturally uncomfortable.
As Chai Jing reminds us: "To tell the truth is a form of kindness. To see is to take responsibility." And to preserve a language is to stand with those who were never meant to be remembered.
5. What challenges have you faced during your journey?
Jennifer: I believe the most difficult part of interviewing is truly seeing the other person—seeing the truth—and then bearing the responsibility that comes with that act of seeing. The difficulty doesn't lie in what I witness, but in whether I have the courage to confront what I've seen. Genuine seeing is not just observational—it is a profound emotional and moral encounter. Many journalists witness disaster, disappearance, or pain through the lens of a camera. But for me, the real question is: Am I willing to stay in that moment of seeing, to acknowledge its complexity, rather than rushing to judge or retreat into distance? That demands putting aside all my preconceptions. It means not reducing the interviewee to a "symbol of a phenomenon," not rushing to stake out a position, but instead, truly listening—to what a person says, and why they say it. To me, this is a moral discipline: learning how to set aside who I am, and allowing the interview to become a space for who they are.
6. Advice for future changemakers
Jennifer: All meaningful change begins with small actions—subtle choices that push, shape, and eventually determine the course of things. To be involved in language preservation is to be involved in humanism—in the intricacies of being human, in human complexity and emotion. And at the heart of that, the most important principle is respect. Interviewing is not about exposing someone's wounds. It is about preserving their wholeness as they speak of pain. Interviewees often exist in vulnerable positions, so the most difficult—and most essential—task is to approach truth without violating their dignity. If we take it further, I believe our pursuit of truth should not be driven by curiosity or the thrill of defiance alone. What matters more is recognizing where we stand within the system—and whether we are prepared to bear the consequences that come with uncovering difficult truths. A true linguist or anthropologist is someone who chooses to stay after seeing, who puts aside judgment in order to listen, who questions with both restraint and courage, who walks the line between power and humanity—and who takes responsibility for all of it.
