Summary
Title: Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages
Author: Mark Abley
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Co.
ISBN: 061823649X
Pro:
• Balanced presentation - sympathizes with language preservation, but can be critical of preservationists
• Explains very well why language is important
• Introduces us to languages we would never know existed - and might not exist for much longer
Con:
• Covers so much ground that it may seem uneven in places
Description:
• Exploration of how and why so many languages in the world are dying out
• Part travelogue, part sociological study, part linguistic analysis
• Argues that the loss of so many languages is a serious loss for everyone
Book Review
Although there are around 6,000 languages in existence today, most are currently used by small numbers of people - in some cases, by one, two, or a small handful. They are dying off at the rate of about one every two weeks; by the end of the century, more than half will probably be gone. Mark Abley's recent book Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages is an attempt to introduce people to some of those languages, what is special about them, and why their disappearance would be a loss for everyone.
A Canadian journalist who is also a former Rhodes scholar and editor of *Saturday Night and *Maclean’s, Abley's book is not a text on linguistics or even really language, although that might seem to be the case. In fact, what Abley has created is a very unique mix of sociology and travelogue that uses language as the framework.
The problem for so many languages is that they just can't preserve a sufficient level of usage in the context of global culture, global entertainment, and global industry. Abley traveled all over the world - from Oklahoma to Provence, from aboriginal Australia to Baffin Island - to find out how some of these languages are faring. Some are going quietly into oblivion while others are fighting back as best they can.
- "A minority language can quickly come to seem a hobby for the old - a quaint refuge from ambition, knowledge, progress. A minority language always depends upon popular will. It dies as its voices fade in the midst of PalmPilots, cell phones, and Walkmans. It dies as its remaining speakers find they have less and less to talk about."
Some people might not care much about an obscure language spoken by a few people in some remote jungle - after all, if it had any real value, it would survive, right? Language is not, however, a market-driven enterprise; instead, it is a function of how well a culture and ethnic group is able to maintain itself against the pressures of globalization or imperialism:
- "The price of that loss is beyond estimation. We have grown used to giving cultural artifacts a dollar figure: so many thousand for a Yeats manuscript, so many million for a Ming porcelain. But a language is more than any artifact. You can't slap a price tag on a language, no matter how small and obscure, any more than you can pin down the financial value of an ivory-billed woodpecker or a bill of rights. ... Being widely spoken does not make a language any better, more intelligent, or more perceptive than a language that has never spread beyond its birthplace."
More than the languages, though, Abley also discusses the people themselves - remember, this is more a sociological than a linguistic work. Indeed, some readers might be disappointed that Abley sometimes gives relatively little attention to the nature and structure of the individual languages themselves. Abley wanted to find out, for example, what people thought about the fact that they might be among the last speakers of their language, and hence among the last bearers of their own culture.
