The Rise and Fall of Languages

Rating:
Summary: Excellent for the dabbler in linguistics
Review: I'm interested in linguistics, and I took a few classes in it in college twenty years ago. This was a very interesting book for someone like me, since it presents new ideas in diachronic linguistics, without assuming more background than I had. It was great to be taken out to the edge of the field, where science is being done, without having to battle through a mass of technicalities. Plus, it's very well-written and fun to read.

Rating:
Summary: Good review of language history and origin
Review: R M Dixon is a well known linguist who specializes in the aboriginal languages of Australia. In this captivating book, Dixon presents his theory of punctuated equilibrium (adopted from the idea of the same name by evolutionary theorists Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge) to describe how languages change. Dixon challenges linguists to dedicate more time to the study and description of the thousands of languages on the verge of extinction, rather than devote their energies to arcane formalisms. The author is also highly critical of those historical linguists who claim to have found evidence for the "mother of all languages", accusing them of poor methodology. Historical linguistics involves slow and painstaking analysis of language forms, and Dixon is not the first to chastise newcomers for shoddy work. Dixon's book is not overly technical, and is thus suited for both a professional and a lay audience. Anyone interested in learning more about the evolution of language should read Dixon's latest work.

Rating:
Summary: A good book for those with a bit of background
Review: This is not the best first book to read in linguistics, but if you already know some general linguistics and historical linguistics, it's good. What it significantly does is offer a critique of the Nostratic School of linguistics (which has been done elsewhere, most notably on a PBS "Nova" show) and offer a new critique, a punctuated equilibrium theory borrowed from the natural sciences. The p-e theory is quite cogent, but Dixon doesn't develop it in too much detail (which is actually his point, that most of the history of human language is irrecoverable). What Dixon does do is offer a research program for practicing linguistics as well as a huge putdown of the theoretical obsessions of most linguists practicing today. This part of the book is actually the most entertaining and courageous; I agree with the author in thinking that too much work is being devoted to Chomskyan (and other purely theoretical) linguistics and not enough to descriptive studies. Whether the money is actually available to record the 1500 or so as-yet unrecorded languages is highly debatable. Dixon himself puts forward a figure of about $300,000 per language. I have a feeling that if any government agency decides to follow through with Dixon's proposals, they'll have to pick and choose which languages to save. Although Dixon puts himself forward as a tough-minded reactionary railing against the vaporisms in contemporary linguistics, he winds up being in the same boat as impractical environementalists to whom any suggestion of, say, which chunk of rainforest to save is complete sacrilege.