Dying Words

"This book is a history of world languages which focuses on the small languages that make up about 96% of all spoken languages but are spoken by only about 4% of the world’s population. It’s language history from the point of view of the ‘little guy.’ Evans gives you an idea of how the world seems when you speak a very small language and how you interact with lots of other groups who also speak very small languages. In some sense, a language, rather than being a mark of the people, becomes a mark of a geographical area where you know that particular group lives. The book also thinks about how other bigger languages have worked over the centuries and millennia and examines their evolution from the point of view of the small languages. It’s this approach that makes this book so interesting and distinctive. It’s in five parts, but theory and anecdote pervade it all. Each part is structured in a different way. I have talked really just about the first part. The second part points out how many languages there are when they are viewed not locally but globally and how your view of your own society is expressed in the grammar of that society. The third examines how languages are a result of the spread of human beings around the world. The fourth looks at language artists and the fifth at the present dangers confronting language diversity. What it is saying is that you get a very universal view of humanity from looking at these small communities and that the artificially large communities that we have built up over the last couple of millennia distort our view of what we are. He is, and there is. Evans is a great expert particularly on the languages of northern Australia. They turn out to be more diverse than those of the centre and southern parts which all belong to a single family."