Samantha Ellis's Reading List

"This is a wonderful book that is completely unlike all other books about endangered languages. Ross Perlin works at the Endangered Language Alliance in New York city, which is working to reclaim, revitalise and preserve languages. They are not interested in mourning or lamenting. So many of these books are about tracking down the last speaker, and, when you finally find them, they can only say one word and no one knows what it means. But if you read Perlin’s book, it’s full of life. It’s radical. It’s exciting. Out of those 7000 on the planet, 700 of them can be found in New York, and many of those are endangered, because this is where refugees have ended up. He describes an apartment block-which he calls ‘a vertical village’-where 100 people speak Seke, a language from Nepal. There are only 700 speakers of Seke worldwide. These 100 speakers are in New York, they’ve been transplanted, but they are keeping it alive. He talks about Lenape, the language spoken in Manhattan before it was settled. He says that there would be a sort of magical justice if New Yorkers were all suddenly speaking Lenape. It’s a book that’s full of humour. At one point, the wonderful woman who is trying to keep Lenape alive gets a parking ticket and she jokes that maybe she should say: It’s my ancestral land, I’m not going to pay it. I love that. I love the whole approach to keeping it alive, speaking it, connecting through it, and just enjoying the richness of it. He describes walking down the street in the borough of Queens, and just how many languages he hears in a short walk. Someone needs to do this for London. It’s very positive in that way. This is a book about movement and migration, transplantation and displacement. It’s an exciting, optimistic book about endangered languages."

"Yes, it’s a picture book. It’s really more about endangered alphabets than endangered languages, but some of these alphabets are from endangered languages. One story swallows all the others, but the others can still be found within this one story. I thought that was very powerful. English is a magpie language. We borrow from so many different languages, including Arabic and Yiddish. All these words have filtered into English. Sam Winston uses 50 scripts to illustrate his book, including cuneiform. So it’s really lovely. I bought it to read to my son when he was about six. I wanted to explain what an endangered language was—how his grandparents speak a language that will be dead by the time he grows up. So I bought this picture book, and we found it really helpful. Yes. When my son was about two, I was talking to a French mother in a playground. She said she was bringing up her child bilingual. I said I wanted to send my son to the French nursery down the road, because it would be nice for him to be bilingual too. She said: But you’re not French! Why don’t you send him to a nursery for your language? I found myself saying that my language was dead, then I absolutely burst into tears. For years I couldn’t go back to that playground, because I really did make a bit of a scene. After that, I started researching. Everyone originally told me that Judaeo-Iraqi Arabic is always written in Hebrew. This made no sense to me, because my grandmother, who was then in her nineties, didn’t read or speak Hebrew. So how could she be writing it? Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . It seems that, originally, it was written in the Hebrew alphabet but, later on, women who were writing didn’t necessarily have the religious education in Iraq, so they were writing in the alphabet they used the rest of the time—the Arabic script. Then, as people became more secular, more people wrote in Arabic. But it wasn’t written down much; it was mainly an oral language. When Iraqi Jewish writers wrote books, they wrote it either in fusha , which is classical Arabic, or in the languages where they ended up. So there are lots of books by Iraqi Jews in French and English and Hebrew. If you are in a small language group, you are almost by definition going to be absorbing and changing and moving. That’s what your language will do with you. It adapts to your life. My family in Iraq were always code switching. They’d leave the house and go straight into the Muslim Arabic, the Iraqi Arabic that was more generally spoken. And then if they were writing or reading textbooks at school, they would be using Modern Standard Arabic. Then They’d come home and go straight into the Jewish dialect. Some people call it a language, others a dialect. I think in a small language you are always absorbing words, but there’s a beautiful reason for that—which is that everyone is talking to everyone else. I think we get quite fixated on whether something is a language or a dialect. You know—the purity of a language. But actually we are always borrowing words from other languages all the time and from other people. Even in this conversation I will have heard something you say—a turn of phrase—and a few days later I will probably use it, and vice versa. That’s how language works. Certainly, in Iraq, everyone was speaking to everyone else and all the languages borrowed from each other. The Jews came to Iraq in 597 BCE, and they were speaking Hebrew. They switched to the local language, Aramaic, but they carried over all these Hebrew constructions and words. Then, when the Arab Conquest came, everyone switched to Arabic, but again they carried over a lot of Aramaic and Hebrew constructions and kept them."

"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."

"Well, I wasn’t sure this would be allowed. It’s a brilliant novel about an alt-reality Victorian England where translation has actual power. If you find these pairs of words that almost mean the same thing but not quite, you can inscribe them on silver bars, and they generate energy. These silver bars are used to power industry. So the British Empire is bringing linguists from all the colonised countries, from the most far-flung places, but then these linguists rebel. One of the things they do in the rebel stronghold is talk about how a great extinction event began on the day Christopher Columbus set foot in the new world. Since then, languages have been dying. Diversity of languages is essential to the running of this empire, but yet it is grinding them out. There was something so powerful in how, in this fantasy novel, in this unlikely setting, she captures something incredible about what we are losing. Obviously we are not trying to power our empire with silver bars, but we are losing a richness. There’s an amazing scene where all the rebel linguists are in Oxford. These people speak everything and love languages—they have mad combinations of languages that no one but a linguist would have learned. And that love of real, arcane languages has brought them together, and in fact is what makes them start a revolution. It’s a deceptively fun book. In linguistics there has been an anxiety about borrowing too many metaphors from the natural world. The linguists Aidan Pine and Mark Turin argued that, if you start talking about endangered languages in the way we talk about endangered species, it can imply an agentless process where it’s natural that things are dying out. But things don’t just die out. People don’t wake up one day and decide to speak a dominant language. There is usually a lot of violence and displacement in the stories of these languages becoming endangered. Certainly. I found writing the book incredibly emotional and difficult at times because I thought I was just going to write about language, but I ended up writing a lot more about the other things we let go of, or are taken away, and the decisions we do and don’t make about the culture we hang onto. So it became a bigger book, but I found the process of learning about what has been lost and what is being lost very connecting, very healing. I found this idea that I could be a ‘keeper.’ It really helped me, this idea, because I very fixated on being a speaker, on getting the language back as an adult. But, actually, if I can talk about the language and culture, and pass that on, that might be my role. And that might be worth doing."