Name: Spoken Here
ISBN: 9780618565832

Mark Abley

Explores the linguistic characteristics and oddities of some of the world's threatened languages, including Max, Mohaw, Yiddish, and Boro, and the diverse forces that threaten to destroy them and the cultures that spawned them.

Travels Among Threatened Languages

Spoken Here

Nick Gracilla

The storyline repeats itself relentlessly: consider this threatened oral language; it has a fascinating grammar/vocabulary/descriptive power entirely different from English. Languages are invaluable: to lose one is to lose a worldview. If only those kids would trust their culture and learn it, and stop with the evil English! Woe. 

If you are very interested in linguistics or grammar, there are moments of interest here. And it reads well as a travelogue, from Australian to Wales. But the overriding sentiment fetishizes and romanticizes languages for languages sakes. But why do languages die out in the face of modernity? Because the way of life in which they're rooted has collapsed, economically and socially. To save a threatened language is to live a way of life, a choice each generation makes.

Spoken Here Travels Among Threatened Languages

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