Spoken Here

This post is about a book I read last summer called Spoken Here: Travels among threatened languages by Mark Abley. I have been going through my books and posting them for sale on Amazon. Since I already read this book, I'm getting rid of it, and I want to blog about it before I do.  I highly recommend this book - he's not a linguist, so you don't need to be one to understand him. I made notes as I read it. It is about disappearing languages. In one chapter he addresses the idea that one language is not "better" than another. "Languages evolve, of course, but they evolve toward simplicity." Our world has become more complicated, but our languages have gotten simpler.
"No language merits extinction by reason of incompetence." When native languages give in to English or Spanish it is not because those native languages were worthless or lesser than the world language that won out over them.
I love this quote: "Modern English is the Wal-Mart of languages: convenient, huge, hard to avoid, superficially friendly, and devouring all rivals in its eagerness to expand."
I learned some interesting U. S. history that they didn't teach us in school: "Andrew Jackson ordered the expulsion of all Indians in the southeastern states. It didn't matter whether a people had been friendly or hostile to the whites: they had to leave. (The next president) Van Buren declared, 'No state can achieve proper culture, civilization and progress as long as Indians are permitted to remain.' Through the 1830s, the US Army forced tens of thousands of Indians to abandon their homes at gunpoint and walk westward. untold thousands died along the way." Sounds like the Nazi death marches that Americans are so quick to proclaim as horrible. Its different when we do it, though.

Language is a "constant struggle for maximum communication, with minimal effort." People are always shortening things - sounds assimilate, syllables disappear - due to this lazy tendency in language.

"The knowledge that a language is disappearing can make its last speakers perpetually anxious to say it right. Yet languages depend on noisy use, not silent perfection."

"Indigenous languages might benefit from a gift of energy, money, and outside expertise. Even so, for the purposes of language reproduction, no external gift matters as much as self-belief. If mothers, fathers, and grandparents want to speak a language with their children, that language will survive. But if mothers, fathers, and grandparents are constantly told that their language is an old-fashioned relic, unfit to be uttered in a classroom or a factory, and useless for their children's future, then few of them are likely to keep up the struggle."

Overall, a great book.