Customer Reviews

Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages

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The viral-like spread of English as the lingua franca of the modern world has had many disturbing effects, not the least of which is its corrosive effect on hundreds of languages spoken by comparatively small populations. Canadian journalist Abley isn't so interested in detailing how this has happened (it's pretty obvious that the proliferation of satellite television and the Internet over the last decade, coupled with American hegemony is largely to blame), but rather seeks to visit these communities to see what efforts are being made to preserve native tongues. Long chapters on specific regions (Northern Australia, Oklahoma, The Isle of Man, Provence, Quebec, Wales) are separated by briefer interludes on various related themes. This is a fascinating topic, and one I somehow expected to find more interesting than Abley makes it.

It's hard to put a finger on why the book was a bit of a letdown. Abley is scrupulously fair-minded in his reportage, and has clearly done a great deal of research. He's careful not to blindly place language preservationists on a pedestal, and asks some genuinely hard questions. Although here's clearly a champion of these disappearing languages and draws a distinct parallel between biodiversity and linguistic diversity, he doesn't shy from shining the light on the failings or more objectionable sides of preservationists. That said, there are a few shortcomings. One of these is that he never really discusses how this whole issue worked in the past. When the Roman Empire ran amok, did Latin replace indigenous speech? More problematic is his focus on languages developed nations. For example, the spread of Spanish in South America, and English and French in Africa have had profound influences, but ABley sticks to North America, Western Europe, and Australia. Finally, the prose-despite noble efforts to inject humor at times-remains rather dry throughout. Some of the chapters run on and on, and would have benefited from judicious editing.

Still, it's hard to fault a book on such an important topic, and the mix of sociology, travelogue, linguistics, and history is probably the best approach to the topic. Recommended for those with a deep interest in the whole wide world and/or language, others may find it slow going.

In Wulai, the aboriginal village I live in, the cutoff is in the twenties. Those over thirty speak Tayal (also Atayal; an Austronesian language of Taiwan) as their first language. Those under twenty understand it pretty well, but rarely speak more than a few phrases. I make a point of speaking to children in my rudimentary Tayal, so they can practice ¡V and show off - without the embarrassment of being caught making a mistake. I nag parents to encourage their children to speak Tayal: if you don't, a tradition of over six thousand years will die with you. Several tribal elders have asked me to teach them how to write Tayal in roman letters. Children are elated to see their grandparents struggling with pen and paper, and this encourages them to repeat what their elders are saying. The administration started Tayal classes in Wulai Elementary, but I hear funding is being cut now that the Party feels one hour of Tayal a week is not going to bring them votes. Tayal is losing ground to Mandarin. What is to be done?

What is to be done? Spoken Here is practically a handbook for me, of things I can try, things I can avoid, in my personal crusade to impress Tayal on the next generation. The author is alert to cant, dogma, and dead-end thinking, so the reader can see the fallacies of certain viewpoints. The writing is fluid and informative. His sympathy to the speakers of these languages makes their plights come alive.

I wish books like this came with a CD. Looking at the word Tayal, did you have any clue that it is pronounced dah-YEN? If I write a Tayal word such as qsnuw or mksingut, does that give you any idea of how to pronounce it? I would love to hear what Yuchi, Wangkajunga, or Mohawk actually sound like (although a friend who has been there told me Welsh sounds like angry geese). I have listened to a couple Australian Aboriginal languages by tracking down their websites, which raises my main ¡V albeit minor - complaint about this book. In the Sources, he tells us things like "see the Web site of the Maori Language Commission" or "All these organizations have web sites." It would have burdened him very little, and given the book completeness, if he had taken the trouble to provide the http addresses for those sites!

This book contains an amazing amount of surprising facts, everything from old proverbs in the Manx language to lizards in the Australian outback. I was a little afraid that it would be depressing to read, but the book is so well-written and even funny at times that I wasn't depressed at all. The author points out that in spite of the pressure of English, languages don't have to die if their speakers are really determined they should carry on. It's very accessible to non-linguists because the author doesn't talk down to readers or use academic jargon. Highly recommended.

From my viewpoint, a book of this sort is almost bound to end with a somewhat middling review. First, it is comprised of several sections, which although clearly tied together by the same issue are really wholly independent of one another. As is often the case in these sort of things, some sections stand out as particularly strong, some as merely average, and others as a bit weak. Secondly, the book is clearly not focused so much on the linguistics, yet cannot cover the topic without resorting to some linguistics. It is not solely a travel book, yet because the author does in fact journey to these dying languages it is partly a travelogue. Partly this, partly that--it is difficult for a book to overcome that sort of mongrel construction.
So yes, this book has its weak moments, its points where you wish he either delved more into the languages themselves or more into the settings/societies. But if Abley hasn't hit a homerun here, the book is more often successful than not and it does have some standout moments.
Language death is often discussed in abstract terms and one of the strengths of this book is that the author shows us the impact on actual living, speaking (for now) people. This has the effect of making the loss of such languages as Provencal or the aboriginal languages of Australia be felt more sharply by the reader. The sadness, the resigned weariness of these last few speakers of a dying language is hauntingly conveyed in their conversations with the author, lending the book an elegaic tone throughout much of its pages. Few of these stories will have happy endings and Abley's interviewees face that fact bluntly, as does the reader. But if most of these languages are past the point of no return, Abley also does a good job of showing some of the success stories, though without shying away from the tenuousness of the successes. The sections on "revived" languages balance the book's tone somewhat, and even the in not-so-optimistic sections, Abley does a good job of lightening the tone now and then.
The same good sense of balance is shown through Abley's care in not "deifying" those struggling to preserve the dying languages. It would have been easy to paint them as saintly underdogs automatically gaining the readers' admiration and sympathies, but Abley is unafraid to point out the negatives (in-fighting among language advocates, hints of xenophobia, use of violence, strangely poor teaching techniques) as well as obviously, the more positive aspects of fighting to retain a language's existence and use.
As mentioned, there are some weaknesses. Some sections seem a bit long. Some don't have the power or intimacy of the stronger ones. And often one wishes for more examples, or more examination of the languages themselves, more discussion of the difficulty of translation or the way language conveys a thought process or a perspective. All of this is touched upon in each section, it's just some are covered more fully than others. A more frequent aid to pronunciation would have been helpful as well; I at least found it frustrating to be reading about words and phrases I had no idea how to say. As I said, overall the book though uneven succeeds more than it fails and stands as a good, more personal and emotional introduction to a topic which will one assumes will only come up more and more often as English continues to encroach as the dominating language. Recommended.

First, it must be noted that any potentional complaints about this book being damaged by its eschewing of intense linguistic study is completely meaningless; this is a work of sociology, not linguistics; I'm not sure what sort of book such hypothetical critics are looking for, but the fact that this isn't it says nothing about its quality.

What we have hear is an intriguing look at a variety of minority languages and the people who work, sometimes quixotically, to preserve them. The tone ranges from elegiac, as Abley meets one of the last two speakers of an Australian aboriginal language, to bathetic, as what begins as a triumphant story of a nineteenth-century writer single-handedly dragging a language--Provençal--back from the brink of extinction morphs into a tragicomic tale of infighting and ludicrously excessive hero worship. As someone who has always been fascinated by these issues but who has had no formal study in them, I found these and other surveys that Abley undergoes to be fascinating. It's true that the book--by necessity--is perhaps not as wide in scope as it could have been, and some of the chapters did feel a little over-extended: was it really necessary, for instance, to devote so much space to Welsh? Nevertheless, I feel that overall, this book was a horizons-expanding read, and I highly recommend it.

I've read other books that discuss endangered languages, such as David Crystal's _Language Death_ and John McWhorter's _The Power of Babel_, but this book discusses the issue in a much more specific way through a series of encounters with speakers of threatened languages. Abley travels to Australia, the U.S., France, and the U.K. and considers Yiddish and Mohawk against the background of the struggle between French and English in Quebec, where he lives. There is a chapter called, "Don't Vori, Be Khepi" which describes how English is infiltrating the major national languages like French, German, and Russian that wonders if all languages are ultimately threatened by English. I made this book my staff recommendation in the bookstore where I work but there was something that kept me from being as enthusiastic as I wanted to be about this book. Then I realized that the author only traveled to developed countries and didn't look at how languages competed in a multilingual environment as they do in India or in African countries where there are colonial languages that link to the world, powerful national languages spoken by many people, but not the majority; and then a multitude of other languages. The closest he comes to this is in his discussion of the competition between standard English, Creole, and the many Australian Aboriginal languages. He does include an interesting chapter on the "Verbs of Bodo" which lists concepts expressed by single verbs in an Indian language that have no English equivalents, but this was all drawn from a single book and didn't involve any travel. After visiting so many languages on the verge of extinction, Abley wanted to find a place where a minority language was thriving and ended up in Wales which inspires the liveliest chapter in the book. As much as I wanted to be sympathetic to the struggle to preserve languages, in one case where a traditional taboo prevents two of the last speakers of a language from talking to each other, my first reaction was "F**k them if they're that maladaptive." But I'm still rooting for the other languages.

How wonderful a book dealing with the impact of language death on speakers of all the world's languages could have been. Unfortunately, Mr. Abley's odd, irrational fear and mistrust of linguistics and linguists has done him, and his book, a grave disservice. Maybe if Mr. Abley had taken the time to better acquaint himself with a few linguistic basics instead of dismissing all of linguistics wholesale, he might have created a more lucid and coherent account of a truly important subject.