The last speakers - The Library of the Uncommons

Hardcover

English language

Published June 9, 2010 by National Geographic.

ISBN:: 978-1-4262-0461-6
OCLC Number:: 251204945

Part travelogue and part scientist's notebook, The Last Speakers is the poignant chronicle of author K. David Harrison's expeditions around the world to meet with last speakers of vanishing languages. The speakers' eloquent reflections and candid photographs reveal little-known lifeways as well as revitalization efforts to teach disappearing languages to younger generations. Thought-provoking and engaging, this unique book illuminates the global language-extinction crisis through photos, graphics, interviews, traditional wisdom never before translated into English, and first-person essays that thrillingly convey the adventure of science and exploration. - Publisher.

2 editions

4thace reviewed The last speakers by K. David Harrison

Review of 'The last speakers' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

This book tells the story of what it is like to try to preserve the last traces of a language before its last living speakers are gone. The work takes the author and his team to remote places such as the Siberian steppe, the high mountains of Bolivia, and the Australian outback, places where they sometimes have a hard time locating a speaker who can or will agree to give their language samples to strangers. More than once the people they meet tell how they had been oppressed by the majority culture when they tried using their tongue and sometimes they have been able to find the very last living speaker who has no one to converse with. Languages are traced according to common words and rules, and there is a a thrill of scientific discovery when an isolated language shows features found in no other known tongue, or when …

This book tells the story of what it is like to try to preserve the last traces of a language before its last living speakers are gone. The work takes the author and his team to remote places such as the Siberian steppe, the high mountains of Bolivia, and the Australian outback, places where they sometimes have a hard time locating a speaker who can or will agree to give their language samples to strangers. More than once the people they meet tell how they had been oppressed by the majority culture when they tried using their tongue and sometimes they have been able to find the very last living speaker who has no one to converse with. Languages are traced according to common words and rules, and there is a a thrill of scientific discovery when an isolated language shows features found in no other known tongue, or when there are signs of an adaptation of one language family to a completely different one. He tells of strategies dwindling communities use to preserve the knowledge such as forbidding it to be spoken outside of a small secret group versus spreading it even among non-native individuals, or restricting it to a purely oral means of communication versus creating a writing system to store it after the last living native speaker is gone. Some languages are conservative when it comes to creating new words while others find a kind of agency creating vocabulary so as not to be forced to use someone else's. The author produced a documentary film on this facet of linguistics. The tone is chatty, non-academic, because he clearly wants to bring awareness of language extinction to a wide audience beyond the specialty. He spends some time talking about why languages ought to be preserved before they vanish, if only to preserve the traditional stories which are intertwined with the the means of expressing and passing them on. He hopes to inspire more researchers to go out and track down the moribund languages no longer picked up as native speech by children, analogous to biologists recording critically endangered species before it is too late.