Endangered Languages and Linguistic Rights: On the Margins of Nations is a collection of papers originally presented at the Foundation for Endangered Language's (FEL) annual conference; the 2004 meeting was held in Barcelona. The great majority of the papers are written in English, with a few in Spanish and one in Catalan.

FEL conferences tend to bring together people from many different backgrounds who have in common their interest in endangered languages and their worry about how to stem the decline of the world's linguistic diversity. The participants are not solely linguists, but also endangered language speakers, demographers, cultural theorists, activists, and politicians. The 2004 conference was no exception, and one of the strengths of the book is the breadth of perspective which it offers.

The book has three sections, each corresponding to one of the general themes of the conference. Common to all three topics is the idea of “bottom-up” versus “top-down” perspectives on language policy and language endangerment, and the tensions and contradictions which result from these different perspectives. Many papers are concerned in some way with the interplay between local groups and state and federal regulators. What are the relationships in language politics between the individual, the local group, regional authorities, and the nation? Are there such things as global linguistic human rights? What are they, and how should they be implemented? Who should implement them? These were the main questions raised by contributors to the volume.

The first theme is “grass roots efforts and top-down institutions.” The role of federal, state, and local policy in endangered language planning (and revitalization efforts) is highlighted. Leanne Hinton gave a keynote address on this topic and her paper includes an informative and interesting survey of language policy in the USA as it relates to Native American Languages. On the “bottom-up” end of revitalization, Hinton discusses the differences in reclamation efforts involving language use and language learning and mentions some of the problems confronting language revitalization efforts as purely language teaching enterprises. She gives a set of practical suggestions for making language revitalization programs more effective, including emphasis on language use over language pedagogy. Government language policy (in relation to Alaska) is also the focus of Patrick Marlow's paper.

Perhaps not surprisingly, authors differ in their views of the effectiveness of government policy when contrasted with local efforts. Dyrkheeva, for example, begins her paper with the sentence “[l]anguage policy is one of the most significant aspects of language vitality.” (p. 31). It is clear from some other areas, however, that language policy bears little relation to language use. In some parts of Aboriginal Australia, for example, language transmission continued despite the threat of physical violence and forceful English-only policies in boarding schools and the wider community; witness the moving stories of several Australian Indigenous participants at the previous FEL conference, in 2003 in Broome, Australia, of being locked in cupboards with family members as the only chance they had to speak their ancestral languages in safety. It is also noticeable that much of the decline in languages such as Navajo has occurred after the relaxing of language laws. As Ward (p. 89) states it, “except in very exceptional circumstances, no amount of political will can save a language if its speakers do not want it saved.” (O'Callaghan (pp. 195–6) makes a similar point.) Likewise, if the will to continue to speak the language is there, government intervention will not necessarily result in language attrition.

The papers represent language policy discussions relating to the USA (Tulloch), Buryat Republic (Dyrkheeva), Ethiopia (Leyew), Malawi (Kamwendo), Australia (Hobson), Mexico (Demay and Martinez), Catalonia (Solé), Poland (Moskal), Paraguay (Melià) and Nicaragua (Benedicto et al). Only two of the papers discuss language endangerment in general; Ward discusses some of the practicalities of implementing linguistic rights for extremely endangered languages, and argues that severely endangered language communities in poor countries can adapt strategies used by larger groups with more capital to accomplish similar results, once they are clear about what they want and whether they want to exercise such rights. Wright's paper concerns the definition of a language (as opposed to a dialect of another language) and the implications of various definitions for language rights.

The second theme of the conference was “the global versus the local in linguistics rights.” There are four papers in this section. Patxi Goenaga's plenary Fronteras que dividen y fronteras que separan: una Mirada a Europa desde el Euskara [borders that divide and borders that separate: a look at Europe from the Basque Country] is an examination of issues relating to the Basque Country (history, sociolinguistics, and sociopolitical concerns) and how the Basque region is placed within the political geography of the EU. The title of the paper refers to the borders that separate areas within the Basque region (for example, the national border between Spain and France, as well as more intangible boundaries created by sociolinguistic factors such as knowledge of the Basque language) and borders with delineate the Basque Country from the rest of Spain and France. Kuo's contribution, on language rights in Taiwan, is a summary paper which gives an overview of the language situation in Taiwan, the sociohistorical context of the creation of ‘Taiwanese Mandarin’ and the tensions between this new language variety and other languages spoken in Taiwan, such as Hakka and Southern Min. Das discusses European Union language policy as it relates specifically to endangered languages.

Amorrortu et al (“What do linguistic communities think about the official recognition of their languages?”) is a report on a survey conducted through http://www.amarauna-languages.com on responses by Indigenous language speakers to official government recognition of their languages, either at the state or federal level. Discussion in this paper is confined to Central and South America, although data seems to have been collected for other areas too. The responses are grouped under four headings. The declaration of the language as official was universally perceived to be a positive step, although many said that official status is not enough, and that the declaration of the language as official does not prevent perceptions that the status of the language is not secure and not under threat from policies related to the majority language(s).

Thirdly, there were papers on “languages crossing the borders.” The papers on this theme focus on land rights, borders, local autonomy, and related issues, and all are case studies of particular areas (Japan/Russia, the Balkans, Argentina, Catalonia, Crimea/Ukraine, Bulgaria, Kazakhstan (compared with Norway and Ireland), and Iraq). O'Callaghan's discussion of three areas with strong political nationalism but weak linguistic nationalism is one of the few with practical suggestions about the causes of the failure of particular language polices. He makes the following suggestions:

• language policies need clear aims, and need to be realistic
• accurate data on language use needs to be collected (e.g. as part of a census)
• language policies need to be continually supported and followed through
• in cases of national languages spoken by a minority of the population (e.g. Kazakhstan, Ireland), language promotion should begin with the consolidation of skills among those who use the language already
• social and political development of areas where the language is still spoken (where language use is correlated with socioeconomic disadvantage, as in, for example, Ireland) to avoid the “fishbowl” problem.
• the need to create educational resources, media resources and to facilitate expansion of the language into many domains of use.
• attention needs to be paid to avoiding ‘purism’ and overcoming stereotypes.

The final section of the book gives summaries of the eight poster presentations, all of which also relate in some way to the “bottom-up” and “top-down” theme.

I was a little disappointed by some aspects of the book. We are given a good overview of the types of questions we need to asking, but answers, or even suggestions for how answers might be achieved, are few and far between. Many of the papers are reports from the field, as it were; we have a good sense of the state of endangered languages in various parts of the world from this volume (which itself is valuable information), but there is little in the way of policy suggestion. This is probably an accident of the conference, not a fault of the volume; after all, it's what everyone decided to talk about, but it is revealing that there are so few proposals for what to do or guidelines for action. We also have many papers which mention negative situations but few that discuss positive situations. Are we to assume from this that there is so little positive to report?

Another topic on which the volume is largely silent is the role of the linguist as activist. The late Stephen Wurm, for example, suggested while working for UNESCO that one of the main ways to promote language revival would be to promote a sense of ethnic identity. However, as Leyew discusses (p. 43), it is not clear that there is such a simple relationship between language and ethnic identity. (Indeed, as we know from the extensive literature on the subject, the attendant issues are, in fact, extremely complex.) There also seems to be a general lack of awareness of the anthropological research on the topic of researchers and community rights (which feeds into the topic of linguists as activists and their role in language politics). In many ways linguists are not that different from other social researchers.

Many previous FEL conference volumes have been fantastic source books. That is, they represented a combination of case studies (with reference to the wider literature) and summaries of the state of the art, with a wealth of practical suggestions; I did not feel that this was the case in this volume. This is a book which will not provide the answers, but it should get us thinking.