Searching for Lost City: On the Trail of America's Native Languages

by Elizabeth Seay

The author, a writer and editor for the New Yorker, journeys back to her native Oklahoma in search of the rapidly dying Indian languages and dialects, particularly focusing on the Comanche and Cherokee languages.

272 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2003

About the author

Elizabeth Seay is a features editor in the Journal Reports department of The Wall Street Journal, assigning articles for reports including C-Suite Strategies, Health, Travel, Technology, Workplace Tech, Cybersecurity and Artificial Intelligence.
She formerly worked in the Personal Journal department handling columns on work/family, life and style. She is the author of "Searching for Lost City: On the Trail of America's Native Languages."

Reviews

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating book. The author spent time in Oklahoma researching dying languages, and looking for surviving speech communities. It was much less about linguistics than I thought it would be, but more about the big picture of language, what it means to a community, what it means for a language to die. I learned a lot about Native American cultures from this as well. The best chapter was about her attempt to learn Cherokee, and another that stood out introduced a couple of Seminole rappers.

[Tori · Rating 3 out of 5]

2010- The title is a bit of a misnomer, the author's focus is on Native American languages within Oklahoma, with a real focus on Cherokee. This book had some very interesting sections, including when the author tries to find someone to teach her (a white woman) how to speak Cherokee. I only wished she had examined some other Native American languages in detail as well.