Review by Choice Review
Intended as a companion to the documentary film The Linguists, which was released at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, this excellent book is especially suited to those wanting to know what field linguists do. Although Harrison (Swarthmore College), who co-starred in the film, does not convey the long-term commitment necessary to document a language adequately, he presents both a nice summary of the value of documenting and preserving endangered languages and an engaging description of cultural variation as reflected in language. Harrison and fellow National Geographic Society fellow Gregory Anderson proposed the "language hotspot," a concept discussed and illustrated nicely in this book. Also of interest is Harrison's description of the fieldwork that led to the discovery and description of Koro, a recently discovered language in India. Though the book provides little in the way of linguistic detail, linguists as well as nonspecialists will appreciate this book both for Harrison's writing and for his description of his fieldwork. And the photographs are, of course, stunning. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers, but especially lower- and upper-division undergraduates and general audiences. C. L. Thompson Indiana University-Purdue University, Fort Wayne
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Parallel to the extinction of biological species in our world, human languages are disappearing one by one. These tongues originated over millennia inside geographically isolated communities for whom modern methods of transportation and communication have proven mixed blessings. Harrison details the work of linguists who are speeding to preserve these tongues for posterity. He travels to Siberia to meet Aunt Marta, one of the last speakers of Tofa, a Turkic tongue. Although a scientist and a rigorous analyst of language grammars and structures, Harrison is particularly intrigued by the personalities of these mostly elderly yet fully engaged people who bravely face the end of what has been a nurturing society. Harrison compellingly details reasons why the rest of the world ought to care about these vanishing languages and what can be done to ensure that they live on despite the irresistible ascendancy of today's rapidly evolving world culture.--Knoblauch, Mark Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Harrison (When Languages Die, 2007) passionately profiles linguistic survivors from Paraguay to Siberia and explores what will be lost if their languages drift into extinction.What will be lost is a great deal, indeed, for language carries the wealth of the human mind and human experience, especially so in languages without written form. "All cultures," writes the author, "encode their genius in verbal monuments, while considerably fewer do so in stone edifices." With the shift to global tongues, entire domains of ancient knowledge will lose their subtle, intimate, complex understanding of local affairs, a place's history and resources, as well as a broad slice of the personal identity of the lost-language's speakers. This makes perfect intellectual sense, but Harrison takes the next step. With his "Enduring Voices" project, he travels to the speakers of endangered languages and engages them in as thorough a fashion as they will grant. From Bolivia to India to Australia, he hunts and gathers what he can of languages on the brink. Harrison introduces plenty of basic linguistic theorysuch as the importance of grammar in relation to human cognition and the peculiar case of vowel harmonythough the author is more interested in content than structuresuch as the art of storytelling, or story-singing, how it offers a portal into the past and how the oral tradition exercises memory, animates landscapes and keeps a language alive and growing. Harrison also brings to light "hidden languages," tongues unknown to a wide audience and for good reasonthe speakers are keeping them secret out of fear that they will be appropriated, subverted or repressed.As the author provides an opportunity for language elders to speak, the consequences of knowledge and identity loss become alarmingly evident.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
