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When languages die: The extinction of the world's languages

and the erosion of human knowledge by K. David Harrison

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398 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 87, NUMBER 2 (2011)

believe it will be. Just as all bilinguals are not automatically translators by virtue of being bilin-
gual, linguists are not necessarily aware of the human side of speaking multiple languages, and
they can profit from hearing about the relationship that ordinary speakers have with the languages
they speak.
I remember my first Mario Pei book (1954) that I was given as a teenager. It felt more like pulp
fiction than schoolwork, but it brought me to the field. Likewise, Bilingual: Life and reality does
not promote any contemporary linguistic theory. Rather it is a readable, informative, and emo-
tionally satisfying work. Those qualities have perhaps more weight now than in G’s 1982 book.
This time they come from someone who has been a strong and consistent contributor to the re-
search underlying the book’s themes on which the bridge to the nontechnical reader is built. The
book is a gift. It is a good gift for multi- and monolinguals alike, and it is a gift to linguistics that
helps us explain our field to nonlinguists.

REFERENCES
BEAUJOUR, ELIZABETH. 2011. Bilingual/Polyglot writers: Comparative Literature 85500. Course taught at the
Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
BIALYSTOK, ELLEN. 2007. Language acquisition and bilingualism: Consequences for a multilingual society.
Applied Psycholinguistics 28.393–97.
BLOOMFIELD, LEONARD. 1933. Language. New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston.
GORDON, RAYMOND, JR. (ed.) 2005. Ethnologue: Languages of the world. 15th edn. Dallas: SIL International.
Online: http://www.ethnologue.com.
GROSJEAN, FRANÇOIS. 1982. Life with two languages: An introduction to bilingualism. Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press.
GROSJEAN, FRANÇOIS. 1989. Neurolinguists, beware! The bilingual is not two monolinguals in one person.
Brain and Language 36.3–15.
KROLL, JUDITH. 2009. The consequences of bilingualism for the mind and the brain. Psychological Science in
the Public Interest 10.i–ii.
PEARSON, BARBARA ZURER. 2008. Raising a bilingual child. New York: Random House.
PEI, MARIO. 1954. All about language. Philadelphia: Lippincott.
UNESCO. 2002. Objective no. 6. Universal declaration on cultural diversity. Paris: UNESCO.
WIERZBICKA, ANNA. 2005. Universal human concepts as a tool for exploring bilingual lives. International
Journal of Bilingualism 9.7–26.

c/o Department of Linguistics

University of Massachusetts Amherst
226 South College
Amherst, MA 01003
[[email protected]]

When languages die: The extinction of the world’s languages and the erosion of
human knowledge. By K. DAVID HARRISON. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Pp. 304. ISBN 9780195372069. $17.95.
Reviewed by ANDREW NEVINS, University College London,
and ADAM ROTH SINGERMAN, University of Lisbon
A linguist dedicated to documenting languages in the field and to raising awareness of lan-
guage endangerment, K. David Harrison offers in When languages die (WLD) an exploration of
how ‘traditional’ or ‘indigenous’ (terms we introduce in quotes, recognizing their fragility) lan-
guages encode vast ecological, astronomical, topological, and mathematical information. Neither
a how-to-save-languages guide nor a treatise on technical linguistic theory, this book aims to syn-
thesize diverse academic fields through the prism of language structure and vocabulary, echoing
 REVIEWS 399

Sapir’s (1921) view of language as ‘the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous
and unconscious work of anonymous generations’ (220).
Examining how languages encode knowledge of taxonomy, geography, and calendrics via lin-
guistically and culturally specific terminology, H asks, ‘is it unique, irreplaceable knowledge, or
merely common sense knowledge uniquely packaged? Could such knowledge ever be adequately
captured in books and video recordings in the absence of any speakers? Once vanished, can such
knowledge be re-created, will it re-emerge spontaneously after a while, or is it forever unrecover-
able?’ (9–10). Whereas much linguistics research examines languages so as to understand typol-
ogy and constraints on grammatical structure, WLD focuses on the useful, practical knowledge
of environment, of local species and technologies, and of numerical cognition that languages
may encode.
The dual interest in cultural knowledge and individual indigenous peoples leads to an inter-
calary structure for the book, with chapters and paired case studies organized by kinds of knowl-
edge. The case studies, which focus on individual communities and speakers, highlight the very
human side of language loss, though they sometimes have only a tenuous relationship with the
chapters that they accompany. Both chapters and case studies provide many human-centered an-
ecdotes and examples, with a sizeable number from H’s extensive fieldwork. The first chapter
sets the scene with an introduction to language death, examining correlations and divergences be-
tween language extinction and biological extinction. It provides a useful demonstration of ‘lan-
guage hotspots’—those areas with the highest indices of language diversity and extinction—and
discusses how just a handful of languages have an enormous number of speakers, whereas an
enormous number of languages have only a handful of speakers.
Ch. 2, ‘An extinction of (ideas about) species’, which focuses on biological taxonomies and
ethnobiology, asks an intriguing question: even though any ‘ideas can be expressed in any lan-
guage’ (24), how do some languages efficiently organize such ideas so as to optimize the packag-
ing of information? Drawing on his own fieldwork in Siberia, H shows how the Tofa utilize
highly precise vocabulary that specify age, sex, fertility, and domestic usefulness to identify indi-
vidual reindeer in large herds (27). While the concept ‘five-year-old male castrated rideable rein-
deer’ requires a loaded noun phrase in both Russian and English, the Tofa chary transmits the
same information in a morphologically opaque but highly efficiently manner.
Some endangered languages describe natural phenomena via very transparent etymologies, as
shown in the following contrast between the Solomon Islands and England: ‘Only 30 percent of
West Nggela fish names are opaque, or lexically unanalyzable, meaning that for speakers of
Nggela they convey no information about a fish’s appearance, behavior or habitat. By contrast, a
full 55 percent of English names for native Thames River fish are opaque, packaging no ecologi-
cal information’ (42). The Nggela, like other peoples who live in close proximity to their natural
environment, store significant, readily available information about flora and fauna in their lexi-
con. H discusses research that shows how diminished use of an indigenous language correlates
with reduced ethnobotanical knowledge, as in the case of the Barí of Venezuela (53), and reiter-
ates the significance of ‘folk taxonomies’, such as that held by the Wayampi of Brazil: although
independent from the Linnaean classification scheme, the Wayampi categorization of birds
makes fine-tuned, useful distinctions between species.
Ch. 3, ‘Many moons ago: Traditional calendars and time-reckoning’, cites various examples of
traditional lunar calendars that convey information tied to natural cycles. H uses these examples
to propose a typology of monthly systems: ecological; ecological, linked to lunar; lunar, linked to
ecological; lunar; and arbitrary (91). In this typology, English is cited as arbitrary, due to monthly
names that are unpredictable (based on Roman emperors and noncorresponding ordinal se-
quences) and provide no information about the natural world.
Worth remembering, however, is the fact that calendrical systems move quite readily and eas-
ily across linguistic boundaries; consider how many languages have adopted via diffusion the
Gregorian calendar. Though traditional calendrical systems may relay ecological information, the
Tofa, Tuvan, Ös, and other indigenous peoples could in theory adopt the Western calendar and
still make vibrant use of their native tongues, just as other peoples could adopt the Tofa, Tuvan,
400 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 87, NUMBER 2 (2011)

or Ös calendars if they saw some incentive to do so. The issue of disappearing calendrical sys-
tems—what H calls ‘these complex, fragile and highly local calendars, these ingenious time-
reckoning devices’ (92)—is about ‘when peoples assimilate’, not ‘when languages die’. They are
two related but very different questions, and ones worthy of careful delineation.
Ch. 4, ‘An atlas of the mind’, which focuses on map systems, including those that incorporate
frictional distances, terrestrial topography, and multiple frames of reference, argues that naming
patterns and directional vocabulary encode accrued knowledge of human-environment interac-
tions particular to specific ecological niches. According to H, as these wind- or altitude-based di-
rection systems reflect centuries of adaptation to specific geographic areas, their loss implies the
disappearance of knowledge used for wayfinding. H cites Widlok’s (1997) important study of the
Haiǁom Bushmen of Namibia, whose ability to navigate in unfamiliar areas far surpassed their
European counterparts, which included skilled mushroom collectors, and attributes this skill to
the Haiǁom’s patterns of linguistic encoding of terrain. This chapter provides firm support for the
thesis that languages spoken by small populations in specific areas can, in fact, be specifically
tied to those areas. It forms the most striking and most memorable part of the overall argument.
The question of written versus oral narrative traditions is the focus of Ch. 5, ‘Silent storytellers,
lost legends’, which explains how the vast majority of peoples do not write their languages but
nonetheless manage to preserve and transmit myths and information over generations. H points
out that writing preserves but necessarily fossilizes myths, since ‘written stories are only a very
impoverished form of spoken ones. Nowhere in a written text can you discern the tone of voice,
loudness, excitement, gestures, facial expression, or tempo ... all those things that make a story
come alive’ (145). His argument leads to a critique of literacy campaigns, not because literacy is
undesirable but because ‘ “literacy” usually means ability to read and write solely in the dominant
national or regional language (e.g., Hindi or English)’ (148) and ‘literacy in large national lan-
guages is often the beginning of an educational process that leads to abandonment of small lan-
guages’ (149).
Ch. 6, ‘Endangered number systems: Counting to twenty on your toes’, discusses a phenome-
non of endless interest for linguists, anthropologists, and laymen alike: the diversity of numerical
systems worldwide. H discusses a range of bases, from two (Alome) and four (Yuki, Kewa) to six
(Ndou, Arapesh) and even twenty (Pomo), and shows how some may develop from counting on
the body itself: fingers (and the spaces between them!), elbows, collarbones, and other nonex-
tremity landmarks serve to anchor numerals, as in Kaluli and Kobon. H describes overcounting
systems (such as Vogul, in which twenty-two is expressed as ‘two towards thirty’) and their im-
portance for studies of the relation between language and thought. He also reaffirms the impor-
tance of linguistically encoded indigenous knowledge as an alternative to digital technology,
citing the Gay and Cole (1967) study showing that the Kpelle people estimate large numbers bet-
ter than American college undergraduates. Ultimately, H gathers more than enough evidence to
support the important scientific conclusion that the ‘diversity of numeral systems shows us that
base-10 is neither cognitively nor physiologically strictly determined’ (199).
Ch. 7, ‘Worlds within words’, touches on an array of topics traditionally investigated by lin-
guists, including language change, genetic relationships, reduplication, noun classes, and sign
languages. Its brief but lucid foray into case systems and incorporation would serve well for any
introductory course on morphology; its criticisms of comparing complexity across languages are
convincing; and the demonstration of Tuvan’s fine-tuned onomatopoeia and sound symbolism is
striking. While three paragraphs are devoted to kinship terminology, this topic, investigated by
both anthropologists and linguists, merits greater treatment, as does the brief discussion of how
endangered languages can provide information on ancient migrations and the peopling of conti-
nents, thereby aiding in the reconstruction of human history. Indeed, this latter topic deserves
greater elaboration, especially since it has the potential to pique the interest of even those readers
whom the argument for ethnobotanical information packaging fails to convince.
With Chs. 1 through 6 focusing almost entirely on lexical items and structure, some readers
may infer that since wordlists alone can capture vast cultural and ethnoscientific knowledge,
fieldwork focused on the mechanisms of the grammar proper need not be prioritized. Thankfully,
 REVIEWS 401

Ch. 7 (despite its title) goes beyond the level of individual words, and in so doing strengthens the
volume overall.
Surprisingly, at no point do whistled languages enter the discussion. Often used by populations
whose members must communicate across distances (such as valleys between hills), whistled
languages remain tied to small groups’ ecological niches and, thanks to increased use of cell-
phones, face serious endangerment. Given that they represent extreme adaptation by speakers to
their geographic environment (Meyer & Gautheron 2006), why do they receive no attention
in WLD?
H never endorses the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the famous suggestion that a language’s lexicon
and grammatical structure actually shape and constrict its speakers’ thoughts. He instead inverts
it, arguing that languages ‘afford strategies of packaging information, organizing it into hierar-
chies, and embedding it within names’ (25): they do not DETERMINE the shape of culture via ab-
stract mental processes but instead RECORD vast amounts of culturally relevant information.
Rather than marvel at, say, the many Inuit words for snow, H explores the greater ramifications
when that knowledge, transmitted orally through local languages, disappears.
Problematically, however, WLD relies on a rhetorical trope that has come under important
scholarly scrutiny in recent years: the idea of universal ownership of human knowledge. H
muses: ‘We do not even know what exactly we stand to lose—for science, for humanity, for pos-
terity—when languages die. An immense edifice of human knowledge, painstakingly assembled
over millennia by countless minds, is eroding, vanishing into oblivion’ (3). Indeed, WLD’s subti-
tle (‘The extinction of the world’s languages and the erosion of human knowledge’) suggests that,
as the information encoded by minority languages belongs to all persons everywhere, the disap-
pearance of those languages signifies a loss for humanity overall. But as Hill (2002:121–23) per-
suasively argues, this concept of ‘universal ownership’, though common in the discourse of
professional linguists, is infrequently held by indigenous communities themselves. Such commu-
nities may consider their languages key components of local cultural heritage—to which out-
siders, including well-intentioned researchers and academics, have no easy right or claim.
The argument for saving endangered languages often toes a delicate line, especially when re-
searchers seem to suggest that a given people ought to continue to speak their traditional lan-
guage despite potential economic and social disadvantages. Indeed, to argue for the maintenance
and revitalization of languages so that outsiders may benefit from the knowledge they contain can
come eerily close to the kind of material exploitation that has endangered and wiped out so many
indigenous peoples in the first place. While H does not endorse MONOLINGUALISM in nondominant
tongues, it bears repeating that many language revitalization programs should probably hold a
MULTILINGUAL model (which allows for both local cultural survival and larger socioeconomic in-
corporation) as an ultimate goal.
WLD sometimes appears to put forth overgeneralizations about the West versus the rest. For in-
stance, the focus on lunar calendrics in Ch. 3 leads to a false dichotomy between ‘traditional’ cal-
endrical practices, tied to natural cycles, and the Western calendar. Consider pre-Conquest
Mesoamerica, in which a highly elaborate system of calendrics included simultaneous cycles of
365-day years and 260-day ‘ritual counts’, each divided up by thirteen day numbers and twenty
day names. Though largely separate from the cycles of the natural world, the ritual counts of this
interlocking system were (and remain, among certain indigenous peoples today) of extreme im-
portance for society and religion.
Despite these limitations, WLD offers a well-researched and well-argued demonstration of
deep connections between languages and the transmission of important knowledge—ethnobotan-
ical, cultural, or spatial—and therefore reiterates the central importance of documentation and re-
vitalization. A definite contribution to the growing body of accessible literature on language
endangerment, death, and revitalization, it should be read in conjunction with other works, such
as Nettle & Romaine 2000, Abley 2003, and Grenoble & Whalen 2006.
The loss of linguistically packaged information about ethnobotanical, numerical, and naviga-
tional phenomena results from increased use of technology and assimilation into a system of global
standardization, trends that are in principle orthogonal to continued transmission of minority lan-
 402 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 87, NUMBER 2 (2011)

guages and that therefore lie outside the purview of most linguistic research. Nonetheless, WLD
makes a convincing case for linguists to embrace interdisciplinary cooperation. Although we often
view endangered languages as rich sources of information for studies of grammar and typology,
language death also leads to the loss of knowledge in areas as diverse as religion, ethnobotany, folk-
lore, and calendrics. We thus have a professional duty, H argues, to partner with colleagues in an-
thropology, ethnoscience, folkloristics, and other disciplines so that documentation and revitaliza-
tion efforts can be as culturally inclusive and technically informed as possible.

REFERENCES
ABLEY, MARK. 2003. Spoken here: Travels among threatened languages. New York: Houghton Mifflin.
GAY, JOHN, and MICHAEL COLE. 1967. The new mathematics and an old culture. New York: Holt.
GRENOBLE, LENORE, and LINDSAY WHALEY. 2006. Saving languages: An introduction to language revitaliza-
tion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
HILL, JANE H. 2002. ‘Expert rhetorics’ in advocacy for endangered languages: Who is listening, and what do
they hear? Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 12.119–33.
MEYER, JULIAN, and BERNARD GAUTHERON. 2006. Whistled speech and whistled languages. Encyclopedia of
language and linguistics, 2nd edn., ed. by E. Keith Brown, 573–76. Oxford: Elsevier.
NETTLE, DANIEL, and SUZANNE ROMAINE. 2000. Vanishing voices: The extinction of the world’s languages.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
SAPIR, EDWARD. 1921. Language. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.
WIDLOK, THOMAS. 1997. Orientation in the wild: The shared cognition of Haiǁom Bushpeople. Journal of the
Royal Anthropological Institute 3.317–32.

Nevins
University College London
Department of Linguistics
Chandler House 115a
2 Wakefield Street
London WC1N 1PF, United Kingdom
[[email protected]]

Singerman
Fulbright Commission
Avenida Elias Garcia, 59 - 5o
1000-148 Lisboa, Portugal
[[email protected]]

Lessons from documented endangered languages. Ed. by K. DAVID HARRISON,

DAVID S. ROOD, and ARIENNE DWYER. (Typological studies in language 78.) Amster-
dam: John Benjamins, 2008. Pp. 375. ISBN 9789027229908. $173 (Hb).
Reviewed by DAVID BRADLEY, La Trobe University
This valuable and interesting volume is one of many outputs of the Dokumentation bedrohter
Sprachen (Documentation of endangered languages; DoBeS) project, funded by the Volkswagen
Stiftung starting in 2000. It follows up on the Brenzinger 2007 volume, which was also supported
by the same funding source and surveyed overall worldwide levels of language endangerment.
The volume provides a very substantial contribution of case studies on linguistic and other impli-
cations of endangerment and various ways of documenting endangered languages. It is also of
more general interest in covering a rich array of data that illustrate the effects of language contact
on linguistic structure at all levels from phonology to discourse. After a brief introduction by the
editors, eleven chapters range over methodological issues, ethical issues, and linguistic outcomes,
as well as some sociolinguistic, anthropological, and historical factors. The three editors are US-
based, and the twenty authors include scholars based in Europe, the US, and Latin America.

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