When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World’s Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge (review)

Ever since the publication in 1992 of the now famous call to arms to document and study endangered languages (Hale et al.), a tremendous amount of attention has been focused on the disappearance of the world’s languages. In this time, the issue of language endangerment has engaged increasing numbers of not only anthropologists and linguists, but also members of the general public. But even though the issue has attracted attention in the popular press, it is still often difficult to explain to nonlinguists just what is lost when a language ceases to be spoken. In an era of increasing globalization, with the predominance of English as a global language, it is challenging at best to describe to monolingual speakers what they miss by not knowing a second language, and to convince them that not everything is translatable. I have found this to be the one of the more challenging aspects of the current endangered language discourse that attempts to engage the general public. Speakers of the world’s major (numerically major in terms of speakers, and politically dominant) languages are generally skeptical that there is much if any value to “small” languages. Even bilingual speakers who speak two languages of wider communication often see little benefit to a language with only a few thousand or fewer speakers.

The book reviewed here is a response to this dilemma. Harrison documents, in a clear and engaging manner, a vast array of knowledge systems that he argues will be lost as the linguistic systems that encode them disappear. The book begins with an introduction (pp. 3–22) that maps out the issues of language endangerment and loss of knowledge. To call this loss of knowledge, however, is a simplification: Harrison is more concerned with the very fundamental ways in which different people have conceptualized the world they live in, how that conceptualization shapes their understanding of the world, and how that is linguistically encoded. His point is major: language loss brings more than the loss of knowledge of specific ways of doing things, or of knowledge of specific species or cultural artifacts; rather, it goes to the very core of the human experience. This argument emerges and is reinforced in a variety of ways in the topically focused chapters around which the book is organized.

The book begins with an introduction mapping out the basic issues of language endangerment and loss of knowledge. This provides an excellent overview for the remainder of the book. Each of the next five chapters—the topical chapters—is organized around a more general discussion and description of the kinds of knowledge that will be, or already have been, lost, followed by a case study. The first of these, chapter 2 (pp. 23–56), discusses the extinction of ideas about species, probably the most expected topic in a book of this type (pioneered by Nettle and Romaine 2000). This chapter examines issues of folk taxonomies versus (Western) scientific taxonomies and questions of naming practices. The hierarchy of yak colors and patterns in Tuvan, for example, illustrates how saliency (cultural, not just visual) determines which color or pattern is used as the key identifier.

Subsequent chapters address the loss of non-Western systems for keeping track of time, indigenous geographic and directional systems, the art of storytelling and the tension between oral and written cultures, and endangered counting systems. In chapter 3 (pp. 61–94), the discussion of time includes information about lunar calendars and systems for measuring time that are anchored more in nature—seasons, the phases of plant or animal life—than they are in the uniform measuring systems used in Western cultures. The replacement of the former with a twelve-month Gregorian calendar, for example, and an accompanying naming system that is not linked to the local environment is representative of a massive kind of cultural shift. This encroachment is mirrored...