A reading list for language death
Since the turn of the millennium there have been a number of books dealing with language death and the problem of protecting the world’s diversity of languages from the forces of globalization. Some of these are meant for undergraduates, while others want to communicate the problem to the man on the street. Here I’ve compiled a list of the ones that I’ve read. I’ve reviewed them all at Amazon if you want to see my detailed impressions of each book.
- David Crystal, Language Death (Cambridge University Press, 2002) ISBN 0521012716. This is meant for an educated audience with some prior training in linguistics.
- Daniel Nettle & Suzanne Romaine, Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World’s Languages (Oxford University Press, 2000) ISBN 0195152468. This is meant for undergraduates with only a basic linguistics background.
- Mark Abley, Spoken Here: Travels among Threatened Languages (Mariner Books, 2005) ISBN 0618565833. This is written for a mass audience. Unfortunately, the author seems to have no formal training in linguistics and the book contains numerous errors and misunderstandings of the field.
- K. David Harrison, When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World’s Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge (Oxford University Press, 2008) ISBN 0195372069. Here the author describes the problem and his work for an educated readership with some passion for the subject, but no more than basic undergraduate linguistics. In writing this book, the author draws on his personal experience with Siberian Turkic languages.
- K. David Harrison, The Last Speakers: The Quest to Save the World’s Most Endangered Languages (National Geographic, 2010) ISBN 1426204612. This one is targeted towards the general public. It revisits many of the same topics as Harrison’s earlier book, but depicts the author and his peers as almost Indiana Jones-type figures in an attempt to get the layman’s attention.
- Dying Words: Endangered Languages and What They Have to Tell Us (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) ISBN 0631233067. The author hoped to reach a mass audience with this book, but the jargon and transcription choices will probably scare off most people and it looks like another book most suitable for assigned reading for undergraduates. Examples are drawn mostly from the Australian indigenous languages.
There’s a couple of other books that I’m aware of but haven’t yet read:
- Andrew Dalby, Language in Danger (Columbia University Press, 2003) ISBN 0231129009.
- Tasaku Tsunoda, Language Endangerment and Language Revitalization: An Introduction (Mouton de Gruyter, 2006) 311018429X. This is a textbook for university students. Examples seem to be drawn mainly from the Australian indigenous languages.
So that’s eight books in the last 12 years, and I’m sure there’s more I’ve not discovered yet. Whether they are popular or academic, each of them has competition, and the same general background is repeated across them all. Therefore the readership must be larger than I imagine if publishers are willing to put out another such book.
Besides these grim discussions of the threat to language diversity, there are also a surprising amount of general introductions to the subject of language revitalization, which I may list in a future post.
Thanks for the list! I’ve read one of these,and heard of others, but there are some new ones for me on the list!