Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World's Languages

A good book. From page 16: "In the native American language, Micmac, trees are named for the sound the wind makes when it blows through them during the Autumn, about an hour after sunset when the wind always comes from a certain direction. Moreover, these names are not fixed but change as the sound changes. If an elder remembers, for example, that a certain stand of trees used to be called by a particular name 75 years ago but is now called by another, these terms [can be seen as markers for change over that period]. And just in this is a jewel of an example of the potential of "other" languages - what I think of as the magic of languages, and their collective ability to reveal a world that speakers of one language have difficulty accessing. A main premise of "Vanishing Voices" is that so-called native languages, once judged grossly inferior to the main European languages, are repositories of knowledge built up over hundreds and hundreds of years, that will be lost when the language dies, and that do not exist in any other form. But this is just a part of the book. The simplest review is this: if you like this topic, or it "speaks" to you, it's worth the time. Poetic as the Micmac example is, it is not a poetic book. It is a science book, with a message about loss of data, world-view, and different kinds of understandings of the world, and lots of examples.

There is little for me to add to the other fine reader reviews of this work except to say that I found it very repetitive. I am not sure that it could not have been a long article in the Atlantic or Harper's.I am not at all sure that there is much that can be done to preserve some of these minor languages in the long run but I do find it admirable that the authors have taken up the cudgel.

I got the book a while ago for fun and I quite enjoyed it. The author covers really interesting topics and put language death into new light.

Thank you very much! Quick shipping and arrived perfectly in time when I needed for class! Arrive exactly as described!

Excellent book. Beautifully written and covers an amazing amount of information.

Great book, but took around 3 weeks to come in.

It is a very informational book.

Great very happy

Kind of book anyone with conservation a concern should read - including animal conservationists and ecologists. Minority languages and their impending doom is discussed here.Very readable and based on sound research this book gives you the ingnored and somtimes encouraged tradedgy of language extinction. The human story behind the loss of language is told impartially here, yet its saddness is very apparent.What should be done to arrest the decline in language diverstity is also dicussed and the economic and ecological advantages to linguistic diverence is clearly shown.Anyone interested in people, language, the economy and ecology will find this a facintating read. Thoroughly recomended.