47 of 57 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Useful facts & whiffs of Whorfianism, February 6, 2001
The initial thesis of this book is that a small number of "killer languages," most of them Indo-European (English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, French), are in effect causing the deaths of hundreds of indigenous and minority languages around the world. Few would dispute this claim. Nettle & Romaine do an excellent job of documenting this process, with plenty of evidence both historical and linguistic. I learned a lot of new things here.
More dubious is their attempt to link linguistic diversity to bio-diversity and cultural knowledge. For instance, they mention African techniques of metallurgy and the Balinese irrigation calendar as examples of local cultural knowledge worth preserving. However, they fail to demonstrate how these things are dependent on maintaining an indigenous language. After all, a body of knowledge can be translated from any one language into any other--were it not so, Americans would be the only people who could use the telephone, Chinese the only people who could practice kung fu, and Italians the only people who could make pasta. In short, there's a certain amount of Whorfianism here (briefly, the belief that one's language structures one's thought processes), an idea I find difficult to defend.
I believe their case could have been stronger, had it focused more on the spheres of life that are particularly dependent on language, such as literature & art; religious & cultural rituals; and the sense of community that comes with a shared language. I am fully in sympathy with attempts to keep languages from dying out, but found N & R's analysis to be wide of the mark.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Thought-provoking and well worth reading, but has a number of weak points, October 26, 2007
This review is from: Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World's Languages (Paperback)
Anthopologist Daniel Nettle and linguist Suzanne Romaine are prominent scholars on language "ecologies", and in VANISHING VOICES: The Extinction of the World's Languages they have written a introduction for laypeople on the phenomenon of major language death in the modern world, and why we should be concerned.
The history of these developments is the story of the rise of agriculture--the first major change when small populations in equilibrium shifted to dominant and weaker societies--and then the Industrial Revolution where European languages spread all over the world. Numerous case studies are used, such as the decline of the Celtic languages in the British Isles and France, Papua New Guinea youngsters shifting from tribal languages to standard languages, and Hawaiian going from sole language of a million people to a forgotten ancestral language among a now reduced indigenous population.
The authors also fascinatingly show that language death tends to be only one part of poor development strategies with detrimental effects to ecology and human rights as well as local speech. There are ways to stimulate economic development while still preserving the local language, and Nettle and Romaine give several examples of where this is happening, such as Bali, Hawaii, and Israel (where Hebrew, against all odds, has been revived).
When it comes to why we should care about the loss of indigenous languages, one major and perfectly valid reason that Nettle and Romaine give is that certain structures only exist in a few languages on Earth. Had Hixkaryana in the Amazon, for example, died out, we would have never known that human languages can have Object-Subject-Verb order. However, other reviewers have already warned that the book approaches the fallacy of Sapir-Whorfism, by which a given worldview is possible only through some languages and not others.
The book has numerous other problems, most of which are small but which add up to the point that the book sorely needs a second edition with revisions. For one, there are minor factual errors like a map showing the Altaic language family spreading from Mesopotamia into the southern Russian steppes. The Altaic grouping in general extremely controversial, and the spread of these languages--the Turkic migrations--were from the Far East into Central Asia, the very opposite direction.
There is also the troubling condemnation of missionary activities. The authors suggest that missionaries of a faith abroad can only do harm to the local language, ignoring completely such prominent figures as St Stephen of Perm (Komi), St Herman of Alaska (Inuit), and Sts Cyril and Methodius (Slavonic) who in fact protected local languages and helped their development into literary use. The authors overall give the impression that local traditions are always good and worth preserving. I disagree, as linguists we can make only the case that all languages are equal, but there's very little support for moral relativism among philosophers anymore.
Finally, while Oxford University Press has a high standard of typographical and print quality, this book is shoddily made. Poor-quality paper, an impression that seems like photocopying instead of printing, and peculiar formatting. I thought it was just my copy, but all other copies of the book that I have come across are the same.
VANISHING VOICES is worth reading for those concerned by language loss, but few books have left me with such mixed feelings.
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