This splendid and disturbing book began as a series of lectures on "Endangered Languages: Causes and Consequences" presented by its co-authors at the University of Oxford two years ago. Daniel Nettle is an anthropologist; Suzanne Romaine is a linguist; their story is a depressing one of cultural and linguistic meltdown in progress all over the world.
Ninety per cent of the world's languages are expected to disappear in the next hundred years. The extraordinary language shift which has, within the last hundred years, seen the demise of most of Australia's 250 aboriginal languages and almost 100 of California's, is symptomatic of the social processes that have brought about the global village phenomenon, our authors contend. Many of the world's languages are dying due to the spread of a few world languages; it is argued here that this radical restructuring of human societies is not a case of the survival of the fittest, nor the outcome of competition among equals in an idealised market place, but the result of unequal rates of social change resulting in striking disparities in resources between developed and developing countries; and indeed, within developed and developing regions within the same country.
Terms such as "death", "murder" and "suicide" are metaphors that have been applied to vanished languages. Native Americans and aboriginal Australians can hardly be said to have made a free choice to live in a white society, speaking English; some consider their languages to have been "murdered". Murder is certainly an appropriate metaphor in the case of the languages of El Salvador, where, in 1932, 25,000 Indians, identified by language, were rounded up and slaughtered by the army. The fate of the Irish language was classified as "suicide" by Flann O'Brien, because it was "due mainly to the fact that the Gaels deliberately flung that instrument of beauty and precision from them".
Our authors do not agree: as people do not kill themselves on a whim, they do not disguard their language on a whim. Language shifts occur under stressful social circumstances, as Sean de Freine showed in his study of the fate of Irish in the 19th century, The Great Silence. In the case of Irish the miner's canary is still singing; Scots Gaelic is considered seriously endangered, while Breton and Welsh are considered to be safe - for now.
But what can replace this pernicious cultural homogenization, whatever its cause? Bilingualism may be the answer, although it is considered to be an impediment to progress by people who do not realize that when diglossia is stable, each language may live side by side, in its own space, without being a threat to the other. Swedish and Hebrew, as our authors point out, are under no threat whatever from English, even though they exist in a diglossic relation with English at the highest level of international communication. Bilingualism might have saved Ainu, formerly spoken in Japan by a mysterious Caucasoid people; as the linguist Steven Pinker has said, the loss of such an ancient language is like the burning of a library of historical documents, or the extinction of the last species of a phylum.
Vanishing Voices proves that what its authors call biolinguistic diversity - the rich landscape of life encompassing all the earth's species of plants and animals, along with all the earth's people and their languages - should be of great and immediate concern to all of us. It asks us to believe, above all else, that the task of saving endangered languages is linked to the task of saving the earth's indigenous peoples and their habitat, and that the cause of the deaths of both languages and habitat is linked to the politics of prejudice.
Diarmaid O Muirithe is a lexicographer and an Irish Times columnist. His Dictionary of Anglo-Irish: Words and Phrases from Gaelic in the English of Ireland has recently been republished in paperback