SPOKEN HERE: TRAVELS AMONG THREATENED LANGUAGES By Mark Abley,Heinemann, $25

This book may be called a dirge to languages that have died, are about to die, or have survived with great difficulty. Languages have always “died”, that is, people have ceased to use them in their daily lives because they have started speaking another language, voluntarily or under pressure. There are other reasons for the death of a language (it doesn’t explain what happened to Sanskrit and Latin, for example), but it is the reason that applies to all the “threatened languages” Mark Abley refers to in Spoken Here.

There’s Murrinh Patha and Mati Ke, the languages of aborigines in Australia’s Northern Territory, which have barely a few thousand speakers left. As also Yuchi, the language of an American Indian tribe in Oklahoma, the number of fluent speakers of which can be counted on the fingers of both hands and Manx, which has been declared “formally ended” after the death of its last native speaker. Some, like Mohawk, Bodo, Yiddish and Provencal have been revived as part of a resurgent nationalist agenda of its speakers. The culprit, “killer language”, in all these cases, except Provençal, is English, the international lingua franca, the language of global commerce, technical books, music videos, Hollywood and TV. So imminent is the threat from English that linguists fear that of the 6,000 languages spoken in the world today, half may be extinct by the end of the century and of these, barely 600 will be secure.

Spoken Here and the travels Abley undertakes are premised on the notion that the languages which have died ought to be saved because they are remnants of its speakers’ way of life, culture, indeed, identity. Abley jettisons the fashionable computational model of language in favour of the older “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis” which places greater emphasis on a language’s unique “representational” aspects, a version of the truth. As he asks, “How could a person’s modes of representation not affect labor, loyalty, or love?” For Abley, the distinction that Inuktitut makes between utsimavaa (he or she knows from experience), sanatuuq( he or she knows how to do something), qaujimavaa (he or she knows about something), nalujunnaipaa (he or she is not ignorant of something) and nalunaiqpaa (he or she is no longer unaware of something) indicates the way the Iniuks organize experience — something that makes their language valuable for its own sake. At any rate, it is reason enough to preserve it from the homogenizing and simplifying influence of English.

The sympathetic attention of interested amateurs like Abley might be a vast improvement on the hostility that marked earlier responses to these languages of “primitive societies”. But sympathy does not help either. For the death of a language is a slow, painful process, so imperceptible that by the time the speakers realize the danger, the language is beyond all hope of recovery. Abley dramatizes this process of attrition through the personae of a language’s last speakers — Patrick Nudjulu, the old patriarch in Wadeye, who dreams in Mati Ke and talks to his grand-children in it hoping they will pick up a phrase or two; Maggie Marsey, 82, who regularly attends meals at a community centre, so that Yuchi may be preserved in tapes and camcorders.

But the tragedy of an extinct language is not that of one person alone, but of an entire civilization. And the world as a whole. Sadly, this is a lesson the world has not yet grasped.