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Spoken Here:
Travels Among Threatened Languages
by Mark Abley
Time Out New York Review

by Marion Lignana Rosenberg

For linguists, the predatory onslaught of English and the likely extinction within the next century of 90 percent of the world’s 6,000 languages represent cultural disaster. Entire bodies of knowledge may be lost, ranging from songs and mythologies to precise nomenclature for plants and animals still unknown to Western science.

Canadian journalist Mark Abley’s essays, therefore, tend toward elegy, as they involve the last speakers of rare tongues and novelists writing for all-but-vanished readerships. But there are also improbable triumphs, like the survival of Manx (spoken on the Isle of Man), whose advocates used both arson and play groups to spur its revival.

Abley's exuberance sometimes gets the better of him, as in his chapter on Yiddish, crammed with every yiddishism that has ever found its way into a screenplay. Still, his account of the dialect’s evolution is keen and illuminating. Once derided as “the wagging tongue of women” (since Jewish girls were discouraged from learning Hebrew), Yiddish now thrives as an international lingua franca among traditional Jewish men.

Specialists might scoff at Abley’s comparison of French’s “liquid notes” to Monet’s “water-filled visions,” and of Provençal’s “harder, rougher texture” to Cézanne’s “dry light,” but his descriptions are wonderfully evocative. Weaving its way with grace and lucidity through a tangle of political, economic and technological factors, Spoken Here is a must for anyone concerned with the survival of Earth’s cultural ecosystem.

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