Kaybolan Sesler: Dünya Dillerinin Yokoluş Süreci

by Daniel Nettle, Suzanne Romaine, Harun Özgür Turgan (Translator)

California şehrinin bulunduğu bölgede bir zamanlar konuşulan yüze yakın yerli dilinden birini bile öğrenen artık tek bir çocuk olmadığını ya da Avustralya'da 250 en eski yerli dilinin tamamen kaybolduğunu pek az kişi bilir. Oysa gelecek yüzyılda dünya dillerinin en azından yarısı yok olacak. Bu dillere ne oldu? Dil çoğulluğunun kaybolması bizi neden telaşlandırmıyor?

Kaybolan Sesler, bu gidişatın ürkütücü olmanın ötesinde anlamlar taşıdığını savunuyor. Dillerin kaybolması ve çevre sorunları arasındaki bağlantıyı öne çıkarıyor, kaybolan dillerin aslında dünya çapında yıkılmak üzere olan ekosistemin bir parçası olduğunu gösteriyor. Yağmur ormanları gibi değerli çevre kaynaklarını korumak için verilen savaşın farklı kültürlerin ayakta kalması için verilen savaştan ayrılamayacağını ve dil ölümü gibi, ekolojik yıkımın nedenlerinin de ekoloji ve politika kavşağında yattığı, kitabın iddiaları arasında yer alıyor. Kaybolma tehlikesiyle karşı karşıya olan diller savunulurken, bu dillerin son konuşanlarına da bir saygı duruşunda bulunuluyor aynı zamanda. Kitabın daha ilk satırlarında Türkiyeli biri var: Son Ubıh konuşucusu, 1992'de ölen Tevfik Esenç... Güney California'da konuşulan Katavba Siyu dilinin son konuşucusu Kızıl Fırtınabulutu, 1974'te ölen ve Man dilinin son konuşucusu Ned Mandrell ile Mbabaram dilini son konuşan kişi olan Avustralyalı Arthur Bennett başka örneklerden. Dillerimizde insanlığın bütün birikiminin yattığını bilen, çok geç olmadan bu birikimleri kurtarmaya yapılan bir çağrı olması için, Antropolog Daniel Nettle ve Oxford Üniversitesi'nden Suzanne Romaine, bu kitabı, dünyanın en önemli üniversitelerinden biri olan Oxford için yazdılar.

Kaybolan Sesler, herkesi en büyük değerlerimizden birinin, ana dilimizin yok olmasına karşı önlem almaya çağırıyor. Dünya dillerinin çoğunun neden yok olduğunu ve daha da önemlisi, bu yok oluşun korkunç tehlikesini gösteren nefes kesici bir portre çiziyor. Dil çeşitliliğini daha geniş, küresel biyo-çeşitlilik bağlamında değerlendirip kaybolmakta olan dilleri kurtarmak için yalnızca sözlükler ve eğitim programlarının değil, bu dilleri konuşanların yaşam alanlarını ve kültürlerini korumanın da gerekli olduğunu işaret ediyor. Bu arada da dilin nasıl doğduğu, nasıl öldüğü ve yok olmaktan nasıl kurtarılabileceği konusunda çok önemli dersler veriyor.

Genres: Linguistics, Language, Nonfiction, History, Anthropology, Politics, Social Issues

362 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

Reviews

[Behnaz · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read this book in order to write an accademic paper and I found it really useful.
First of all, the book focuses on the technical terms such as Language Death, Language extinction and Language suicide; mentioning that both linguists and biologists refer to the disappearance of a Language or different species with the same terms. This is due to the fact Language is far more than a system of communication. In fact, as the most fascinating invention of humankind, includes various forms of ancient culture and ancient knowledge and therefore the languages most be maintained.
Many think that the existence of a high number of languages is a kind of barrier to the communication but that's not true as institutions should promote the use of the native Language and bilingualism/plurilingualism in the same time.
The book also mentions how the extinction of some languages is related to human rights abuses ( persecution and eradicaion of minorities or forced assimilations to the dominant Language and culture) or to the extinction of various plants and animals.
A must read for anyone interested in seeing languages in a different way.

[Amber · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was a fascinating insight into the world of language and how it directly connects to the world around it. It's also an eloquent plea for making the effort not just to document languages or create educational systems for them, but to change our very way of living so as to encourage the growth of diversity. I highly recommend it.

[Kaelan Ratcliffe ▪ كايِلان راتكِليف · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Ecology of Language

There's so much to unpack with this book. I went in looking forward to experiencing my first outing with a big interest of mine (languages), and came out the other side absolutely stunned. However, I must say this first: in the unlikely event that the publisher - or the authors - see this review, I simply cannot pass up the opportunity to request a second edition of this book. It's been over ten years since Vanishing Voices was first published, and I can easily see this turning a few heads in bookstores with an expanded and revised edition. The reasons being stated below.

For the unassuming reader on Goodreads scrolling past this review, you might find you asking yourself "There's languages going through extinction?", and considering what inner content you would need provided from this work to read it.

Stop right there.

Pick this up.

No matter what you might be thinking regarding the content of this text, I can guarantee you'll gain a huge amount of new, essential knowledge from reading this (not to mention it's 204 pages in length only). Not only that, but this extinction has far bigger implications than you could possibly imagine. If you care about biodiversity destruction, ecology, and the environment, then pick this up as soon as possible.

For those already vaguely aware with this topic, I can promise you something similar to the above mentioned audience. There is so much more to language extinction beyond mild melancholy over how there's languages we can no longer 'hear' ourselves. Languages are linked to biodiversity, identity, community, and what it means to be human. Learning about this in detail was truly incredible. Not only this, but the authors don't pull punches when confronting power. Language loss is intimately tied to the destruction of our ecosystem, resources, and life on earth. As such, it is also closely tied to our current system of exploitation. Language death is the canary in the coal mine for our species. It's many victims are our warning.

Understanding that native peoples have intimate knowledge within their local environment and biodiversity - like The Amazon, which has natives local knowledge exceed sciences current classifications - should be enough for us to consider stopping this from happening. But care for human rights; self-determination and right to autonomy; the ability to pursue ones own destiny; as well as the communities destiny; is also brought to the forefront to discuss. All tackled in these pages.

[Tentatively, Convenience · Rating 5 out of 5]

review of
Daniel Nettle & Suzanne Romaine's Vanishing Voices - The Extinction of the World's Languages
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - February 6-12, 2017

I have much to say on this subject & I say it here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/... . The below is just the truncated beginning of the review so you might as well go to the full thing (broken into 3 chapters).

1st off, this is one of the most important bks I've ever read - wch is to say that it's one of the most important to ME. Here's a list of the other 9 in a top 10 I might put it in w/, not organized into a hierarchy:

The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia - Alfred W. McCoy
Finnegans Wake - James Joyce
footnotes - tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE
Why do Birds Sing? - David Rothenberg
The Many-Headed Hydra - Marcus Rediker & Peter Linebaugh
Gargantua & Pantagruel - Rabelais
t he bk
t he referent 4 wch consists of
t he non-materialized transparent punch-outs from a letter/whatever stencil - Michael Frederick Tolson et al
Impressions of Africa - Raymond Roussell
A Void - George Perec (translated by Gilbert Adair)

That list is highly subject to change. It's tempting to put David Rothenberg's Thousand Mile Song in there or William S. Burroughs's The Soft Machine or whatever. Note that I included 2 of my own bks. I wdn't ordinarily do that but I'm so moved today. Anyway, the rating system on Goodreads has "5" as the highest. I'd give Vanishing Voices an 11.

For decades I've been saying that I think that imperialist languages are technical & that the languages that are being forced into extinction are more 'poetic'. Starting a year or more ago I decided to start (d) composing an 'opera' entitled Endangered Languages, Endangered Cultures, Endangered Ideas intended to be an outgrowth of this opinion. I started acquiring bks, such as this one, to research & to get libretto material from. I'll be culling from my review here for that.

I was explaining my 'opera' to a friend of mine & mentioned the idea that "imperialist languages are technical" etc & my friend, being the type who has to always argue about everything in order to show 'how smart she is' regardless of whether she'd ever given it a moment's thought before, asked me if I wasn't "just being romantic"? I told her that: 'No, I don't think so.' At that point, I'd just started reading Vanishing Voices but I hadn't gotten far enuf into yet to be able to quote from it or explain the authors's positions or to know if they reinforced my own or not.

WEEEELLLLLLL, Vanishing Voices reinforced everything that I'd previously thought & expressed it so articulately that I was very happy to be both born out & to know that such a resource was available. Of course, I'm not in the least happy that the language extinction problem exists. As w/ so many bks that're deeply important to me, reading this w/ the intention of reviewing it was intimidating b/c I felt like practically every paragraph was worth quoting & commenting on & it was very difficult to restrict my note-taking to a reasonably manageable quantity.

"The extinction of languages is part of a larger picture of worldwide near total ecosystem collapse. Our research shows quite striking correlations between areas of biodiversity and areas of highest linguistic diversity, allowing us to talk about a common repository for what we will call "biolinguistic diversity": the rich spectrum of life encompassing all the earth's species of plants and animals along with human cultures and their languages. The greater biolinguistic diversity is found in areas inhabited by indigenous peoples, who represent around 4 percent of the world's population, but speak at least 60 percent of the world's languages." - p ix

The notion of "biolinguistic diversity" is essential to me. Many people I know probably care about any species of animal being endangered but wdn't give much thought to endangered languages. I think it's very, VERY important to recognize that it's all part of the same concern & this bk bears that out brilliantly.

There're 4 photos on pp 3-4 of the last speakers of 4 languages.

"In 1984 Esenc had already written the inscription he wanted on his gravestone: "This is the grave of Tefvik Esenc. He was the last person able to speak the language they called Ubykh." With Esenc's death in 1992, Ubykh too joined the ever increasing number of extinct languages."

[In case the reader is imagining Esenc as some sort of 'wild man' I hereby note that his picture shows a man in a suit & tie, w/ a neatly trimmed mustache & glasses]

"Four years later in South Carolina a native American named Red Thundercloud died, the last voice of a dying tongue. No longer able to converse in his native language with the remaining members of his community, he took the language of his tribe to the grave with him. Red Thundercloud was alone among his people, but not alone among native Americans. Roscinda Nolasquez of Pala, California, the last speaker of Cupeño, died in 1987 at the age of 94, and Laura Somersal, one of the last speakers of Wappo, died in 1990.

"In another part of world on the Isle of Man, Ned Maddrell passed away in 1974. With his death, the ancient Manx language left the community of the world's living tongues. Just a hundred years earlier, not long before his birth, 12,000 people (nearly a third of the island's population) still spoke Manx, but when Maddrell died, he was the only fluent speaker left. Two years before his death, Arthur Bennett died in north Queensland, Australia, the last person to know more than a few words of Mbabaram, a language he had not used himself since his mother died twenty some years before." - p 2

There's really no 'need' for me to say much about any of this b/c the authors say far more authoritatively everything I might say. The purpose of this review is to try to summarize what they say enuf to get people interested in reading the bk. Many people might shrug off the death of languages as a 'natural' occurrence but how wd they feel if the language they speak were to die off around them as an obvious result of socio-political conditions that're irrelevant to actual qualities of the languages concerned?

"English, as Glanville Price put it, is a "killer language." Thus, it has been said that Irish, for instance, was murdered by English. Others, however, have in effect put the blame on the Irish by saying that the language committed suicide. The Irish writer Flann O'Brien, although pro-Irish, resented and rejected the attempt to revive the Irish language, because he was of the opinion that the difficulties faced by Irish were "due mainly to the fact that the Gaels deliberately flung that instrument of beauty and precision from them."" - p 6

This was one of the only things in Vanishing Voices that I had my doubts about. I'll take the authors's word for it that that was really O'Brien's opinion but when I think of O'Brien, whose work I know reasonably well & whose writing I love, & Irish I think of this passage:

"What's this I have in me pocket? Dirty scrap of paper. Some newspaper heading I cut out. 'Language in danger.' Of course, if I was a cultured European I would take this to mean that some dumb barbarous tonguetide threatens to drown the elaborate delicate historical machinery for human intercourse, the subtle articulative devices of communication, the miracle of human speech that has developed a thousand light years over the ordnance datum, orphic telepathy three sheets to the wind and so on. But I know better.

"Being an insulated western savage with thick hair on the soles of my feet. I immediately suspect that it is that fabulous submythical erseperantique patter, the Irish, that is under this cushion—beg pardon—under discussion.

"Yes. Twenty years ago, most of us were tortured by the inadequacy of even the most civilised, the most elaborate, the most highly developed languages to the exigencies of human thought, to the nuances of inter-psychic communion, to the expression of the silent agonized pathologies of the post-Versailles epoch. Our strangled feelings, despairing of a sufficiently subtle vehicle, erupted into the crudities of the war novel. But here and there a finer intellect scorned this course. Tzara put his unhappy shirt on his dad (Fr. for hobby-horse as you must surely know), poor Jimmy Joyce abolished the King's English, Paulsy Picasso started cutting out paper dolls and I . . .

"I?

"As far as I remember, I founded the Rathmines branch of the Gaelic League. Having nothing to say, I thought at that time that it was important to revive a distant language in which absolutely nothing could be said." - pp 102-103, The Best of Myles - Myles na Gopaleen (Flann O'Brien)

No, no.. That's not the passage I'd intended to quote at all! HOWEVER, in the course of looking thru every page in the above-quoted 400pp bk I stumbled across that relevant passage instead of the one I'm looking for. Wish me luck. Back tuit.

"The Irish lexicographer Dinneen, considered in vacuo is, heaven knows, funny enough. He just keeps standing on his head, denying stoutly that piléar means bullet and asserting that it means 'an inert thing or person.' Nothing stumps him. He will promise the sun moon and stars to anybody who will catch him out. And well he may. Just take the sun, moon and stars for a moment. Sun, you say, is grian. Not at all, Dinneen shouts that grian means 'the bottom (of a lake, well)'. You are a bit nettled and mutter that, anyway, gealach means moon. Wrong again. Gealach means 'the white circle in a slice of half-boiled potato, turnip, etc.' In a bored voice he adds that réalta (of course) means 'a mark on the forehead of a beast'. Most remarkable man. Eclectic I think is the word.

"That, of course, is why I no longer write Irish. No damn fear. I didn't come down in the last shower. Call me a bit fastidious if you like but I like to have some idea of what I'm writing. Libel, you know. One must be careful. If I write in Irish what I conceive to be 'Last Tuesday was very wet,' I like to feel reasonably sure that what I've written does not in fact mean 'Mr. So-and-So is a thief and a drunkard.'" - pp 276-277, The Best of Myles - Myles na Gopaleen (Flann O'Brien)

Nope. That's not what I wanted to quote either. But, HEY!, it shd serve to prove that anything by Myles na gCopaleen deserves to be in my top 10. In fact, I hereby alter what my top 10 are by adding the previous 2 runner-up bks & the above-quoted bk. Let's just say that my top 10 are in base 13. 13's an unlucky number b/c it doesn't get a chance to be itself, it has to stay 10 or under. Some numbers have all the luck. HERE'S the part I wanted to quote:

"THE GAELIC

"A lady lecturing recently on the Irish language drew attention to the fact (I mentioned it as long ago as 1925) that, while the average English speaker gets along with a mere 400 words, the Irish-speaking peasant uses 4,000. Considering what most English speakers can achieve with their tiny fund of noises, it is a nice speculation to what extremity one would be reduced if one were locked up for a day with an Irish-speaking bore and bereft of all means of committing murder or suicide.

"My point, however, is this. The 400/4,000 ratio is fallacious; 400/400,000 would be more like it. There is scarcely a single word in the Irish (barring, possibly, Sasanach) that is simple and explicit. Apart from words with endless shades of cognate meaning, there are many with so complex a spectrum of graduated ambiguity that each of them can be made to express two directly contrary meanings, as well as a plethora of intermediate concepts that have no bearing on either. And all this strictly within the linguistic field. Superimpose on all that the miasma of ironic usage, poetic license, oxymoron, plamás, Celtic evasion, Irish bullery and Paddy Whackery, and it is a safe bet that you will find yourself very far from home. Here is an example copied from Dinneen and from more authentic sources known only to my little self:

"Cur, g. curtha and cuirthe, m.—act of putting, sending, sowing, raining, discussing, burying, vomiting, hammering into the ground, throwing through the air, rejecting, shooting, the setting or clamp in a rick of turf, selling addressing, the crown of cast-iron buttons which have been made bright by contact with cliff-faces, the stench of congealing badger's suet, the luminance of glue-lice, a noise made in an empty house by an unauthorized person, a heron's boil, a leprachaun's denture, a sheep-biscuit, the act of inflating hare's offal with a bicycle pump, a leak in a spirit level, the whine of a sewage farm windmill, a corncrake's clapper, the scum on the eye of a senile ram, a dustman's dumpling, a beetle's faggot, the act of loading every rift with ore, a dumb man's curse, a blasket, a 'kur', a fiddler's occupational disease, a fairy godmother's father, a hawk's vertigo, the art of predicting past events, a wooden coat, a custard-mincer, a blur-bottle's 'farm', a gravy flask. a timber-mine, a toy craw, a porridge-mill, a fair-day donnybrook with nothing barred, a stoat's stomach-pump, a broken—

"But what's the use? One could go on and on without reaching anywhere in particular.

"Your paltry English speaker apprehends sea-going craft through the infantile cognition which merely distinguishes the small from the big. If it's small, it's a boat, and if it's big it's a ship. In his great book An tOileánach, however, the uneducated Tomás Ó Criomhthain uses, perhaps, a dozen words to convey the concept of super-marinity—drthrach long, soitheach, bád, naomhóg, bád raice, galbhád, púcan and whatever you are having yourself.

"The plight of the English speaker with his wretched box of 400 vocal beads may be imagined when I say that a really good Irish speaker would blurt out the whole 400 in one cosmic grunt. In Donegal there are native speakers who know so many million words that it is a matter of pride with them never to use the same word twice in a life-time. Their life (not to say their language) becomes very complex at the century mark; but there you are." - pp 278-279, The Best of Myles - Myles na Gopaleen (Flann O'Brien)

Now, obviously, O'Brien is, ahem, taking some liberties here. But, at the same time he does have something to say about what's possible in languages-known-to-entirely-too-few. Imagine how funny he might be in Irish writing about English! At any rate, I'm so inspired by the above that I'm going to look up a list of the top 400 words in English & read them as "one cosmic grunt" at an open poetry reading 2 days from now. (Witness my document of this: "Cosmic Grunt / Betsy DeVos" - https://vimeo.com/203362094 )

But let's get back to something not in the least bit funny: the murder of a language thru the genocide of the language's speakers:

"As a telling example, we can take what happened in El Salvador in 1932, when after a peasant uprising anyone identified as Indian either by dress or physical appearance was rounded up and killed by Salvadoran soldiers. Some 25,000 people were killed in this way. Even three years later radio broadcasts and newspapers were calling for the total extermination of the Indians of El Salvador to prevent another revolt. Many people stopped speaking their languages to avoid being identified as Indian, in order to escape what they feared was certain death in a country which officially had no Indians." - p 6

"Linguistic diversity, then, is a benchmark of cultural diversity. Language death is symptomatic of cultural death: a way of life disappears with the death of a language." - p 7

& let's get real here, Holmes, there're people who want that to happen. I'm not one of them.

"The worst case, however, is Australia, with 90 percent of its estimated 250 Aboriginal languages near extinction. Only some 50 languages are widely spoken today and of these only 18 have at least 500 speakers. These 18 account for roughly 25,000 of the remaining 30,000 speakers of Aboriginal languages. There is no Aboriginal language that is used in all arenas of everyday life by members of a sizeable community. It is possible that only two or three of the languages will survive into the next century." - p 9

One of my preoccupations for decades is that languages don't necessarily translate into each other as easily as the naive might imagine. Some ideas are more native to one language than another, one can expect for there to be ideas in one language entirely lacking from another.

Let's take a somewhat shocking example. My motto (of sorts) is "Anything is Anything". In English that's a pretty straightforward tautology (at least at 1st glimpse). My multilingual friend Florian Cramer, who probably speaks at least 5 languages if not more, offered to translate it into German, his 1st language, for me, He concluded that there's no equivalent in German for "anything". That IS shocking isn't it? His translation had to substitute something like 3 to 5 words for "anything".

I tried Google translation & got "etwas". I then tried the Google translation to get "etwas" into English & got "something". Something ≠ Anything. Looking in my handy German dictionary I find "anything" translated as "etwas" or "alles". Reversing that in the same dictionary I find "etwas" translated as "something" 1st & "anything" 2nd. At any rate, I trust Florian's claim that "Anything is Anything" doesn't translate in its full meaning as easily as: "Etwas ist Etwas" (wch translates back as "Something is Something") or "Alles ist Alles" (wch translates back as "Everything is Everything").

"Thanks to the efforts of linguists, at least there will be some record of Ubykh with its unusual sound system containing 81 consonants and only 3 vowels. (Compare English with only 24 consonants and approximately 20 vowels, depending on the combination of sounds in a particular variety; or Rotokas, a language spoken on Bougainville island in Papua New Guinea, with the smallest number of sounds in any language, only 5 vowels and 6 consonants.)" pp 10-11

"In fact, from the evidence we have to date, it would appear that the most grammatically complicated and unusual languages of the world are often isolates—unrelated to any other language—and often spoken by small tribes whose traditional way of life is under threat. The majority of "world" languages such as Chinese, English, Spanish, and Arabic, spoken by 50 million or more people, are, by contrast, not isolates and they are also not as grammatically complex as many of the world's smaller languages." - p 11

OK, this is a tangent: I prefer complex culture, complex music, eg. I'm exasperated by the way global conqueror iTunes has reduced musical language to a level of imbecility, to "songs" played by "bands". iTunes might as well adapt Rotokas as its language, that way it would at least save something endangered.

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is already 20 years old. Reading it with that in mind induces a sense of hopelessness. The authors make a clear case for the idea that the disappearance of languages is not some linguistic phenomenon but inextricable tied to the disappearance of species and peoples. The greatest amount of language diversity exists in the same marginal and threatened places as the greatest amount of species diversity. The driving of indigenous people to extinction destroys languages and ecologies. Unless someone decided to care about this, humanity is doomed. If this was true 20 years ago, how much truer now when authoritarian nationalism and know-nothingism seems to be overrunning the world's biggest "democracies." They owe a clear debt to Guns Germs and Steel (Jared Diamond) when they discuss why Europeans overran the world and eradicated most everyone else. I thought it was a very interesting point that Eurasia has an east-west axis so the same farming methods and livestock could be propagated across the continent, but the Americas and Africa run north-south so there are multiple climates and the monoculture approach is ridiculous. So much damage has already been done, and I am not optimistic that humanity will realize we are all in this together until it is too late. Reading this in Trump's America is almost too sad for words.

[Tyron Surmon · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is slightly outdated. It spends most of the time arguing against the idea that languages dying out is 'natural' and we shouldn't do anything about it, which maybe 20 years ago was still a commonly held view, but certainly is less so now. Also their wider argument for us to talk about 'biolinguistic diversity', I don't think fully works. I'd have liked more of a focus on individual case studies, and less rehashing of other themes which don't directly relate to languages itself - as even if relevant, I think it could have been a single chapter rather than three. As the start and end of the book were really good, and it would have been nice for it to be like that throughout.

So on the whole, if you have no knowledge of the idea of language extinction, this is a very accessible overview, which covers the topic from several angles. But if you're already familiar with it, you won't learn much.

[Δάσκαλος · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kapisan, maca buku iki marahi mangkel, dudu amarga bukuné élik (bukuné malah apik banget jaréku), nanging amarga kanyatan pait ing kala kapungkur kang dialami wong-wong "pinggiran" (peripheral), kang dadi tetawuring kolonialisme Éropah.

Kapindho, akèh pitakon-pitakon skèptis kang kajawab ing buku iki. Apa gunané nguri-uri basa pusaka, rak ya wis kalumrah ta ana basa sing mati? Apa gunané nyinau basa pusaka manawa ora bisa njalari sugih?

Katelu, buku ini nelakaké apa-apa sing kudu dadi lelimbangan manawa arep tumindak kanthi nyata ing babagan nguri-uri basa pusaka. Conto-conto anggoné basa pusaka kapepetri saka saindenging donya kajlèntrèhaké ing buku iki, murih bisané dadi tuladha marang sok sapaa sing bésuk nedya ngayahi lelabuhan kang padha.

[Briana · Rating 2 out of 5]

Strengths of the book:
Calls attention to the magnitude of language and communicative change taking place today. Includes the languages of indigenous peoples and advocacy.
Weaknesses of the Book:
The “theory” that language diversity is directly tied to biological diversity seems to be motivated by a hope of achieving comparable success to the environmental movement rather than the goal of documenting and understanding language change. Their argument about the decline of linguistic variation has some basis, the decline of the languages of small-scale societies, but even there, new varieties are arising right alongside the decline of old, and they do not address all the relevant information.


*Read this for a college class and these are the notes I took.

[Tori · Rating 3 out of 5]

2009- I've always been interested in endangered languages, but many of the books on the topic seem written for a more professional audience. It was wonderful to find a book like this, written for the more casual reader. Not only did this book delve into the history and ascent or decline of various languages, but also into biological and socioeconomic factors as well. This book will certainly make you a supporter of linguistic diversity.

[Clara · Rating 5 out of 5]

I did a seminar paper on language death for my Sociolinguistics class and got this as a recommendation from my professor.
It's very informative and written in such a way that anyone can understand, which makes it more interesting. It's also a great starting point for anyone who wishes to deal with this subject in greater depth.

[Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

This books reviews all the languages in the world that are going extinct and the cultures attached to them. A very fascinating book. It also discusses many similarities between languages. For the linguist in you...read this book.

[Maged Zakher · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great book!

[Anthony Knuppel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent introduction to folks interested in language preservation and the importance of documenting dying languages of the world.

[Tammy Chiang · Rating 4 out of 5]

A comprehensive overview of the field of Indigenous language studies. Convincing argumentation and well explained terminology.

[Joshua Shockley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such an excellent book! I'm really impressed by how they tied language extinction in with cultural/environmental conservation. They drew everything together really well, showing how conserving languages is the same issue as conserving the environments they work in. Marginalization of ethnic groups and cultural colonization is largely at work in language extinction, and only conservation of these groups way of life and decentralization of the power of people groups can bring us to unity within diversity.

"The active cultivation of stable multilingualism can provide a harmonious pathway through the clash of values inherent in today's struggle between global and local, between uniformity and diversity."

A very thoughtful reflection on multilingualism as contextualized in the global society and how we can avoid the problems that can and do come with forced monolingualism onto people groups by way of marginalization.

This gave me a lot to think about, and be worried about in some ways.

Overall: informative, holistic, impactful, and dense

[Marcos Ibáñez Gordillo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Vamos a actualizar esto que ya toca xD

Las 3 estrellas son por intentar ser objetivo (no es un libro pa quien no le interese, la verdad), pero a mí me ha encantado sin reservas. Una lectura fácil y bien expuesta ha conseguido que el tema que trata me importe más incluso. Me ha ayudado a ver argumentos y a valorar una problemática que ya me rondaba.
Aparte, tiene muchos ejemplos amenos citando otros libros relevantes que tratan la cuestión tanto lingüística como antropológicamente. Por ejemplo "Los enigmas de la cultura" y sobre todo "Mujeres, fuego y otras cosas peligrosas"

Si eso de pega puedo decir que da muchas listas de datos sólo para fundamentar obviedades, pero es como explican las cosas los estudios serios, ¿no?

[Tamara Wasylenky · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book provided the inspiration and foundation for a course I developed on World Languages. Nettle and Romaine connect linguistic and biodiversity in a way that I had not considered. It's a great read if you are interested in languages and the ecological future of the planet.

[Chelsey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Languages are the heart of a culture. Its what links them together. Preserving language is to preserve the culture.

[FMLDNR · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really a very good book

[Lindsay · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read the first chapter and part of the second and stopped. You get the point from the first chapter alone and I can already tell the book will be very repetitive. Definitely an academic read and that’s not what I was in the mood for.

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Anthopologist Daniel Nettle and linguist Suzanne Romaine are prominent scholars on language "ecologies", and in VANISHING VOICES: The Extinction of the World's Languages they have written a introduction for laypeople on the phenomenon of major language death in the modern world, and why we should be concerned.

The history of these developments is the story of the rise of agriculture--the first major change when small populations in equilibrium shifted to dominant and weaker societies--and then the Industrial Revolution where European languages spread all over the world. Numerous case studies are used, such as the decline of the Celtic languages in the British Isles and France, Papua New Guinea youngsters shifting from tribal languages to standard languages, and Hawaiian going from sole language of a million people to a forgotten ancestral language among a now reduced indigenous population.

The authors also fascinatingly show that language death tends to be only one part of poor development strategies with detrimental effects to ecology and human rights as well as local speech. There are ways to stimulate economic development while still preserving the local language, and Nettle and Romaine give several examples of where this is happening, such as Bali, Hawaii, and Israel (where Hebrew, against all odds, has been revived).

When it comes to why we should care about the loss of indigenous languages, one major and perfectly valid reason that Nettle and Romaine give is that certain structures only exist in a few languages on Earth. Had Hixkaryana in the Amazon, for example, died out, we would have never known that human languages can have Object-Subject-Verb order. However, other reviewers have already warned that the book approaches the fallacy of Sapir-Whorfism, by which a given worldview is possible only through some languages and not others.

The book has numerous other problems, most of which are small but which add up to the point that the book sorely needs a second edition with revisions. For one, there are minor factual errors like a map showing the Altaic language family spreading from Mesopotamia into the southern Russian steppes. The Altaic grouping in general extremely controversial, and the spread of these languages--the Turkic migrations--were from the Far East into Central Asia, the very opposite direction.

There is also the troubling condemnation of missionary activities. The authors suggest that missionaries of a faith abroad can only do harm to the local language, ignoring completely such prominent figures as St Stephen of Perm (Komi), St Herman of Alaska (Inuit), and Sts Cyril and Methodius (Slavonic) who in fact protected local languages and helped their development into literary use. The authors overall give the impression that local traditions are always good and worth preserving. I disagree, as linguists we can make only the case that all languages are equal, but there's very little support for moral relativism among philosophers anymore.

Finally, while Oxford University Press has a high standard of typographical and print quality, this book is shoddily made. Poor-quality paper, an impression that seems like photocopying instead of printing, and peculiar formatting. I thought it was just my copy, but all other copies of the book that I have come across are the same.

VANISHING VOICES is worth reading for those concerned by language loss, but few books have left me with such mixed feelings.

[Odile · Rating 3 out of 5]

A well written and informative book that adresses one of the more underappreciated problems of the world of today: Language Death. At least 50% and according to some as much as 90% of the world's ca. 6.000 languages are in danger of dying out during the 21st century.

The book sheds clear light on the scale of this cultural disaster, mention many factors that have caused this process, including colonisation and globalisation: the 'biological and economic waves'. The authors also stress the ties between linguistic and ecological diversity - a view that is not uncontested, however.

All the same, any book that raises awareness of this problem in an eloquent manner is valuable, in my opinion, and 'Vanishing Voices' certainly fits that category. Recommended!

[dejah_thoris · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is well written and solid on its own but after having read Andrew Dalby's Language in Danger about a month ago I found myself liking that book more than this one. Why? Nettle's book has more of a liberal activist bent, which is great in terms of enlightening readers to the severe threat to so many of the world's languages. But its focus on connecting language loss with loss of biodiversity (albeit accurate) gets quite repetitive if you read the entire book. I can definitely see it as a great sources for quotes for a research paper though! Overall, certainly worth reading if you need a good primer on the subject because it did go into slightly more detail than Dalby's book, but be aware that it has an obvious bias to it too.

[Robert Campbell · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book takes an ecological approach to explaining and lamenting the loss of linguistic diversity around the world. The authors suggest that when we lose a language we also lose a great deal of local knowledge about the environment and about how various peoples learned to cope with the geographic conditions within which they lived. The spread of certain languages with the expansion of agriculture is described, as is the acquisition of dominant languages associated with migration to metropolitan areas. Overall an interesting and thought-provoking book.

[Phillip · Rating 3 out of 5]

great subject but the writing is cloudy and uneven. lots (too many) phrases refer us to what will happen in other chapters, too many repetitions, but damn - great points being made here on the relationship between vanishing (mostly indigenous) languages and vanishing eco-systems - both labelled endangered in the text.

[Louise Chambers · Rating 3 out of 5]

An academic read, with tables and statistics, but informative to the layperson, and easy to read. The primary thesis is that diversity of language begets and sustains diversity of ecology, and maintanance of a large variance of languages will sustain the planet.

[Noelle · Rating 2 out of 5]

Nettle and Romaine set up their argument based on the "history in stages" model. In 2011, academics should be well past this by now.

[Alex Marriott · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential. Need to re-read.

[Andy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very good book. Full of well-reseached evidence related to the mass extinction of our world's languages.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating and surprisingly political.