Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages

Rating:
Summary: A bit disappointing
Review: This book received a lot of media attention and it didn't sound half bad. However, I was disappointed by it. One of the other reviewers mentioned that Abley sort of has a predicament where this isn't just a travelogue, but at the same, it's nowhere near a linguistics study. Personally, if he had gone one way or the other, I think it would have been much better. The linguistics he does get into was somewhat boring, and I say this as someone who normally enjoys linguistics, like John McWhorter's superb book, The Power of Babel. Abley also manages to pump in a fair amount of anti-globalization, postmodernist screeds, which a book of this sort doesn't really need. The stories should speak for themselves. I also wish Abley had focused more on languages like Yiddish and Provencal, which ended up getting about the same coverage as obscure Native American languages like Yuchi.