When languages die: The extinction of the world's languages and the erosion of human knowledge (review)

A linguist dedicated to documenting languages in the field and to raising awareness of language endangerment, K. David Harrison offers in When languages die (WLD) an exploration of how 'traditional' or 'indigenous' (terms we introduce in quotes, recognizing their fragility) languages encode vast ecological, astronomical, topological, and mathematical information. Neither a how-to-save-languages guide nor a treatise on technical linguistic theory, this book aims to synthesize diverse academic fields through the prism of language structure and vocabulary, echoing Sapir's (1921) view of language as 'the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and unconscious work of anonymous generations' (220).

Examining how languages encode knowledge of taxonomy, geography, and calendrics via linguistically and culturally specific terminology, H asks, 'is it unique, irreplaceable knowledge, or merely common sense knowledge uniquely packaged? Could such knowledge ever be adequately captured in books and video recordings in the absence of any speakers? Once vanished, can such knowledge be re-created, will it re-emerge spontaneously after a while, or is it forever unrecoverable?' (9–10). Whereas much linguistics research examines languages so as to understand typology and constraints on grammatical structure, WLD focuses on the useful, practical knowledge of environment, of local species and technologies, and of numerical cognition that languages may encode.

The dual interest in cultural knowledge and individual indigenous peoples leads to an intercalary structure for the book, with chapters and paired case studies organized by kinds of knowledge. The case studies, which focus on individual communities and speakers, highlight the very human side of language loss, though they sometimes have only a tenuous relationship with the chapters that they accompany. Both chapters and case studies provide many human-centered anecdotes and examples, with a sizeable number from H's extensive fieldwork. The first chapter sets the scene with an introduction to language death, examining correlations and divergences between language extinction and biological extinction. It provides a useful demonstration of 'language hotspots'—those areas with the highest indices of language diversity and extinction—and discusses how just a handful of languages have an enormous number of speakers, whereas an enormous number of languages have only a handful of speakers.

Ch. 2, 'An extinction of (ideas about) species', which focuses on biological taxonomies and ethnobiology, asks an intriguing question: even though any 'ideas can be expressed in any language' (24), how do some languages efficiently organize such ideas so as to optimize the packaging of information? Drawing on his own fieldwork in Siberia, H shows how the Tofa utilize highly precise vocabulary that specify age, sex, fertility, and domestic usefulness to identify individual reindeer in large herds (27). While the concept 'five-year-old male castrated rideable reindeer' requires a loaded noun phrase in both Russian and English, the Tofa chary transmits the same information in a morphologically opaque but highly efficiently manner.

Some endangered languages describe natural phenomena via very transparent etymologies, as shown in the following contrast between the Solomon Islands and England: 'Only 30 percent of West Nggela fish names are opaque, or lexically unanalyzable, meaning that for speakers of Nggela they convey no information about a fish's appearance, behavior or habitat. By contrast, a full 55 percent of English names for native Thames River fish are opaque, packaging no ecological information' (42). The Nggela, like other peoples who live in close proximity to their natural environment, store significant, readily available information about flora and fauna in their lexicon. H discusses research that shows how diminished use of an indigenous language correlates with reduced ethnobotanical knowledge, as in the case of the Barí of Venezuela (53), and reiterates the significance of 'folk taxonomies', such as that held by the Wayampi of Brazil: although independent from the Linnaean classification scheme, the Wayampi categorization of birds makes fine-tuned, useful distinctions between species.

Ch. 3, 'Many moons ago...