Rare Tongues: The Secret Stories of Hidden Languages

"She’s a Scottish linguist! She started writing this book in London, then the pandemic happened, and she moved back to Scotland. She describes how her accent grew stronger and she relearned words she hadn’t used for a long time because English friends and colleagues couldn’t understand them. Like: dreich, is it? Yes. And ‘chapping’ the doors instead of knocking on them. So she describes how the process of writing this book about rare tongues, these endangered languages, was enriched by her return to Scotland and her Scottish roots. I think it would be a much less powerful book if she’d written the whole thing in London. But her book is quite wide-ranging. She’s talking about whistling languages in the Canary Islands, she’s talking about New Zealand, Sri Lanka, all over the world. She’s exploring the complexity and diversity and richness of languages. There are short chapters on all sorts of things like language ecosystems, all the different sign languages from around the world, all the different whistling and click languages. You get a sense of the amazing chatter of the world. I found it quite powerful."