Endangered Languages: An Introduction (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics), by Sarah G. Thomason (Cambridge University Press, 2015), 229 pages.
“According to most experts’ estimates, at least half of the world’s seven thousand languages will vanish before the end of this century” (2). What an amazing statistic! Those of us interested in biblical languages have felt the sting of this statistic recently, as we heard news about the last of native Aramaic speakers dying out. What is it that leads to language “death,” and how can languages be revitalized? Or should they be?
The purpose of this book is “to introduce the general topic of language endangerment…and to describe some methods designed to prevent endangerment from leading to the disappearance of a threatened language” (2). Thomason is an experienced fieldworker who has worked with two different language communities to document and revitalize their language. Her knowledge on the subject and secondary literature is obviously vast and her personal experience, which she discusses in the book, is both stimulating and illustrative of what it takes to slow or reverse language death.
Summary
Chapter one discusses what it means to be endangered. UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger has six different categories and is the major reference for Thomason throughout the book. There is also SIL’s Ethnologue, but the figures of often outdated. Languages that are endangered generally have low numbers of speakers (but not necessarily) and the native speakers are typically older grandparents, while the children do not learn it as a first language.
How do languages become endangered? Chapter two highlights social, economic, and political factors. These factors include military conquest, economic pressures on minorities (e.g., to speak the majority language if they want a job), melting pot societies in which one language is seen as the natural language to learn, political neglect or suppression of a language (or lack of recognition of a language), community attitudes toward their language, loss of linguistic diversity through standardization (19-35). A language will remain safe (for now) if it is spoken by all ages, allows the community economic power, and in the case of languages with small numbers of speakers, remains isolated from language contact (36).
How do languages become endangered? Click To TweetChapter three illustrates how languages slide into dormancy or death. Thomason gives a history of the decline of five languages: Eyak, Cornish, Egyptian, Yaaku, and Mednyj-Aleut, the latter being the most interesting, as a mixed language using Aleut words with Russian verbal morphology (45-52). She also discusses “tip,” which is the point at which a minority language that appeared stable suddenly begins rapidly declining because of sociopolitical forces (53). Attrition occurs when languages are dying, that is, the “loss of words and structural features, with no replacement features taking their place” (57). This can include the loss of specialized and ordinary lexical domains, structural patterns, phonemes, and verbal aspect. Alternatively, a language can die because of massive borrowing of grammatical and lexical units from another language.
Chapters four and five discuss why it matters if languages die, focusing on the loss of culture and scientific knowledge. Many heart-stirring poems or letters are cited to show how the loss of a heritage language can cause sadness in its community. She argues that the world would not be better off with only a few major languages, as some think, and that the more linguistic data we can collect and preserve, the more insight we have into human cognition. Chapter five also highlights the role languages have played in our understanding of world history. One important example is “click” languages. If these had died before we had discovered them, we would have no idea that human language could incorporate clicks, which would have been an unfortunate linguistic and scientific loss.
Chapters six and seven are less necessary to summarize, since you would need to read them yourself to gain any benefit. She discusses the nature of documenting an endangered language in the field, and what counts as “the field.” She explains basic issues involved in fieldwork and then, in chapter seven, tells stories about her time in two different field positions in former Yugoslavia and Montana. The seventh chapter alone is worth the price of the book, since you get to experience along with Thomason, as she reminisces, what it is like to help a community revitalize their language.
Evaluation
Thomason has a firm grasp on the theoretical issues involved in studying endangered languages and has the requisite experience to write this textbook. The only negative aspect to her experience is that she seems to have been mostly successful in her time in the field. Aspiring fieldworkers would benefit from supplementing Thomason with accounts from those who were less-than-successful so they could be kept grounded in reality and prepared for trouble.
This work also does well to include discussion of ancient “dead” languages such as Latin, Babylonian, Egyptian, and ancient Hebrew, although she explains the factors that arose to the revitalization of Hebrew with the return of Israel in the ’40s. One major gap in this work is any mention of modern attempts to revitalize ancient languages or stages of languages to facilitate certain fields of study.
There are many organizations now involved in trying to revive Koine Greek as a spoken language to help biblical studies students learn the language more intuitively, and some are doing so for biblical Hebrew as well. There are schools that speak only Latin to provide an immersion environment, so is Latin really “dead?” Thomason says that some languages have survived because of their use in religious texts and rituals, but further consideration of what “dead” really means would have been useful, given these revitalization efforts among academics.
I would recommend this book to anyone interested in languages, linguistics, speaking second languages, and especially to anyone who teaches languages. Even the discussion of attrition is helpful for understanding how ancient languages changed over time and became simplified or borrowed from other languages as contact between cultures occurred. Moreover, anyone interested in the revitalization of ancient languages such as Latin, Koine Greek, and biblical Hebrew and Aramaic should read this work, since much can be learned about how to revitalize a language.
