What a great idea for a book - a language-themed road trip across America. Elizabeth Little is not a linguist, but she has had a lifelong interest in languages. And she has a few thoughts about language.
Little notes that there is a surprising variety of languages in the United States. In New York City alone, hundreds of languages are spoken.
She begins the road trip with Native American languages. She finds that most of them are on their last legs as living languages, and this turns out to be one of the themes for the book. Digging into the history of Native American languages, she finds that there's a disturbing pattern of language discrimination of the sort that occurred when Native American children were discouraged from speaking their home languages. Discouragement often took the form of physical punishment as well as creating a sense of shame about the language. It's what Newt Gingrich would call "the language of the ghetto."
Little finds similar language discrimination in the history of Creole language in Louisiana and Gullah in Georgia. This leads her to conclude that "the history of language in America is ... ultimately a history of language loss."
It's hard to disagree with her conclusion and that language discrimination that takes cruel forms is reprehensible. But not all language change in America has been involuntary. Little is disappointed that descendants of Basque immigrants in Nevada speak only a few words of Basque. Yet she acknowledges that she has never felt compelled to learn Norwegian, the language of her own immigrant ancestors. At a Norwegian-American festival in North Dakota, she is perplexed the old-fashioned and unappetizing preparation of lutefisk, a dried fish, with lye, which was necessary before modern refrigeration methods were available. Continuing to speak Norwegian in North Dakota today would be the linguistic equivalent of lutefisk.
The book seems aimed at a younger audience than me apparently, or at least a more pop culture-oriented audience. References to Jonathan Lipnicki, Jared Leto, and Silent Bob went over my head. The attempts to inject humor seemed forced at times - at one point she finds herself in a diner "scrutinizing the décor in the hope it might suggest to me a particularly clever turn of phrase." Another time she resorts to slapstick, falling on her on her backside while running to catch a tour bus.
On the whole though, there's a lot to enjoy and to think about in A Trip of the Tongue. When Little talks about language, she's quite interesting, sometimes almost professorial, and her enthusiasm for language is irresistible.
