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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.
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.
Rating: 
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.
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.
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.
Rating: 
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.
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.
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.
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