Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World's Languages

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Summary: Reviews and Comments
Review: "[Vanishing Voices is] a superb study of endangered languages.. the tapestry of supporting detail is every bit as compelling as the central thesis" - The New Yorker

"Language extinction is a great tragedy for human culture and for scholarship on all things human. This fascinating book is the latest word on this important issue, containing a wealth of knowledge and wisdom. If we have the good sense to rescue the priceless legacy of linguistic diversity before it vanishes forever, Vanishing Voices will surely deserve a good part of the credit." - Steven Pinker, author of "The Language Instinct" and "Words and Rules"

"Vanishing Voices is an urgent call to arms about the impending loss of one of our great resources. Nettle and Romaine paint a breathtaking landscape that shows why so many of the world's languages are disappearing and more importantly, why it matters. They put the problem of linguistic diversity into the wider context of global biodiversity, and propose the revolutionary idea that saving endangered languages is not about dictionaries and educational programs, but about preserving the cultures and habitats of the people who speak them. Along the way it's also a fascinating introduction to how language works: how languages are born, how they die, and how we can prevent their death." - Deborah Tannen, Georgetown University

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Summary: Poor Attempt
Review: I think this book is very repetitive and is a very poor attempt at showing why losing all of these languages is important. They are comparing losing these languages to animals and plants going extinct. They try and draw all of these worthless comparissions that do not make any sense. This book is not even worth being picked up.

Rating:
Summary: Poor Attempt
Review: I think this book is very repetitive and is a very poor attempt at showing why losing all of these languages is important. They are comparing losing these languages to animals and plants going extinct. They try and draw all of these worthless comparissions that do not make any sense. This book is not even worth being picked up.

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Summary: Useful facts & whiffs of Whorfianism
Review: The initial thesis of this book is that a small number of "killer languages," most of them Indo-European (English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, French), are in effect causing the deaths of hundreds of indigenous and minority languages around the world. Few would dispute this claim. Nettle & Romaine do an excellent job of documenting this process, with plenty of evidence both historical and linguistic. I learned a lot of new things here.

More dubious is their attempt to link linguistic diversity to bio-diversity and cultural knowledge. For instance, they mention African techniques of metallurgy and the Balinese irrigation calendar as examples of local cultural knowledge worth preserving. However, they fail to demonstrate how these things are dependent on maintaining an indigenous language. After all, a body of knowledge can be translated from any one language into any other--were it not so, Americans would be the only people who could use the telephone, Chinese the only people who could practice kung fu, and Italians the only people who could make pasta. In short, there's a certain amount of Whorfianism here (briefly, the belief that one's language structures one's thought processes), an idea I find difficult to defend.

I believe their case could have been stronger, had it focused more on the spheres of life that are particularly dependent on language, such as literature & art; religious & cultural rituals; and the sense of community that comes with a shared language. I am fully in sympathy with attempts to keep languages from dying out, but found N & R's analysis to be wide of the mark.

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Summary: Important but repetetive message
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Important but repetetive message
Review: 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.

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Summary: Vanishing voices
Review: This is a serious and important book about the rapid loss of language diversity in the world and what can be done about it. It also explains the ecology of how language diversity occurs and why it is important. Not too technical to be easy to read but also has much more information than I expected.

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Summary: Hundreds of languages teeter on the brink of extinction
Review: To speak of language "death" or "extinction" may sound strange or inappropriate, since a language is not a self-sustaining entity-a language has no tangible existence like a tree or animal. Nevertheless, hundreds of languages of our planet are disappearing every year, dying one by one like the creatures on the Endangered Species List. Indeed, language-diversity and biodiversity have a lot in common, so, shouldn't we be alarmed about the disappearance of linguistic diversity as well?

VANISHING VOICES: The Extinction of the World's Languages tells the story of how and why languages are disappearing. Nearly 100 native languages once spoken in what is now California are near extinction, and most of Australia's 250 aboriginal languages have vanished. In fact, at least half of the world's languages may die out in the next century. The authors Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine assert that this trend is far more than simply disturbing. Making explicit the link between language survival and environmental issues, they argue that the extinction of languages is part of the larger picture of near-total collapse of the worldwide ecosystem. The authors contend that the struggle to preserve precious environmental resources-such as the rainforest-cannot be separated from the struggle to maintain diverse cultures, and that the causes of language death, like that of ecological destruction, lie at the intersection of ecology and politics.

And while Nettle and Romaine defend the world's endangered languages, they also pay homage to the last speakers of dying tongues, such as Red Thundercloud, a Native American in South Carolina, Ned Mandrell, with whom the Manx language passed away in 1974, and Arthur Bennett, an Australian, the last person to know more than a few words of Mbabaram.

In our languages lie the accumulated knowledge of humanity. Each language is a unique window on experience. VANISHING VOICES is a call to preserve this resource, before it is too late.

Daniel Nettle received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from University College London. He is the author The Fyem Language of Northern Nigeria and Linguistic Diversity (OUP). He lives in London. Suzanne Romaine has been Merton Professor of English Language at the University of Oxford since 1984. She is the author of numerous books, including Language, Education and Development: Urban and Rural Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea and Language in Society: An Introduction to Sociolinguistics (both by OUP). She lives in Oxford.

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Summary: Poor analogies, and no real argument
Review: Vanishing Voices does a good job of showing how larger languages are destroying smaller ones, and the methods of language death. This is all pretty much common knowledge. However, the authors fail in their attempt to give a reason as to WHY language death is something with which we should be concerned. The only argument they put forth is in a ecological/enviromental analogy, which says that biological diversity is good and stable, therefore, linguistic diversity must. However, they only go part way in their analogy and reject natural selection for languages. They also show that linguistic diversity corresponds to environmental diversity, but state this has nothing to do with the inexcessiblity of the areas. The violin-playing and loaded words are hard to stomach if you are looking for good social science. I would not suggest the book unless you are an ecological activist wanting to try to link your cause with "saving cultures" or with yet another critique of the West.

Rating:
Summary: Poor analogies, and no real argument
Review: Vanishing Voices does a good job of showing how larger languages are destroying smaller ones, and the methods of language death. This is all pretty much common knowledge. However, the authors fail in their attempt to give a reason as to WHY language death is something with which we should be concerned. The only argument they put forth is in a ecological/enviromental analogy, which says that biological diversity is good and stable, therefore, linguistic diversity must. However, they only go part way in their analogy and reject natural selection for languages. They also show that linguistic diversity corresponds to environmental diversity, but state this has nothing to do with the inexcessiblity of the areas. The violin-playing and loaded words are hard to stomach if you are looking for good social science. I would not suggest the book unless you are an ecological activist wanting to try to link your cause with "saving cultures" or with yet another critique of the West.