Recent years have seen several general introductions to the study of endangered languages, aimed primarily at readers with no special training in linguistics. This is true of Dalby's book as well, and he succeeds in providing the general public with a highly readable account of a current and important linguistic topic.

One of the most original aspects of Dalby's presentation is his examination of two ancient cases, the spread of Latin and Greek throughout the Mediterranean world, for the light they can shed on modern cases. He calculates that of the approximately 60 languages that were spoken all around the Mediterranean in 100 bce, only ten would survive, a rate of less than 17%. The ill-fated languages – such as Gaulish, Etruscan, Oscan, Tartessian, and Punic – are not usually considered in language death studies, in part because the antiquity of their disappearance puts them well before the perceived linguistic crisis motivating most studies of endangered languages today. Dalby brings together quotes from various Classical writers and commentators, from Apuleius and Ausonius to Quintilian, for insights into the linguistic picture of ancient times. Some interesting parallels with modern cases emerge, including evidence that Gaulish and Lydian lingered on longest as languages of magical incantations and spells, or that parents of young children in the various colonies of the Roman Empire would have been motivated to speak Latin to their progeny rather than their traditional ethnic tongues in order to give them a head start in exercising the various rights associated with Roman citizenship. This desire to provide one's children with the tools necessary for success in the dominant society motivates language shift in many linguistic minority families today.

In a later chapter, “How to become a global language,” the rise and spread of Latin in and after the days of the Roman Empire is compared with that of English, propelled to its global role during and after the heyday of the British Empire. Dalby identifies three routes of spread that these two cases share: colonization, “government and what it brings,” and long-distance trade, notably trade by sea. After a discussion of how English loanwords have penetrated nearly every language on earth, Dalby catalogs a number of terms (mostly flora and fauna names) characterizing local varieties of English around the world, the primary purpose of which seems to be to show that the differences between such local varieties are really fairly trivial. He goes on to argue that the different world Englishes will not grow further apart, owing to television and the Internet (p. 206), thus implicitly rejecting the claim sometimes made that language death, even on a massive scale, is nothing to worry about because linguistic diversity will reemerge sooner or later.

The comparison of the ancient spread of Latin with the modern spread of English goes only so far, of course, and Dalby makes it clear that the eventual outcome of the latter promises to be very different from that of the former. Early in his book, he hypothesizes that “large centralized political units” promote a decline in the number of languages spoken within their territories, and that as long as the world “goes on being apportioned among such units, the total number of languages in the world will go on falling” (38). Judging by his rather conservative estimate of around 5,000 languages spoken on earth today (ix), Dalby's view of the prospects for linguistic diversity is rather more pessimistic than most; if the number of languages is halved in 100 years, only national languages will be left in 200 years, and from there it won't be long until English is the only language still spoken (279–80).

Some of the mechanisms of linguistic decline are explored in chap. 4. After briefly surveying some countries where multilingual policies are in place, Dalby examines countries with a history of attempting to suppress linguistic variation within their borders. He considers the French Revolution to mark the beginning of the ideology of linguistic nationalism that would seek to wipe out all other languages and dialects from French soil in favor of the speech of Paris. The focus then turns to the long and all too successful policies of the American government to suppress the indigenous languages of the United States. Dalby brings home the point that by the time such policies were officially altered, in the 1990s, it was too late to reverse the decline that most of these languages had entered.

One of the major tasks involved in writing a book about language endangerment for the general public is that of convincing readers that the large-scale loss of multilingualism would not be a good thing. The essay “When we lose a language” (chap. 6) develops the now familiar argument that important ethnobotanical knowledge is usually lost along with a language. A number of today's important drugs started out as local herbal remedies of small ethnic groups, and we may never know what other remedies have been lost along with the languages and traditional cultures of their speakers. Many now vanished languages enjoy a kind of “afterlife” in the form of loanwords that live on in the vocabularies of the languages that ultimately swallowed them up. Dalby illustrates this with English borrowings from a number of now defunct indigenous North American and Australian Aboriginal languages. Many other languages are “Lost without a trace” (239); they go into oblivion having left no legacy via lexical borrowing, and often without having even been recorded. Here the focus is on the indigenous languages of California, the region of North America where the scale of language loss is the most dramatic.

Another approach to convincing the reader of the tragedy of language loss is found in the essay “The loss of diversity” (chap. 7), which begins by discussing the difficulties of translation between different languages as a way of pointing to their inherent differences. This leads into a discussion of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and Dalby argues in favor of the weaker version, linguistic relativity (the notion that different languages embody different worldviews), stopping just short of fully endorsing the stronger view, linguistic determinism (that speakers of a language are impelled by their language to think in particular ways). Linguistic relativity is an important part of Dalby's argument in favor of preserving linguistic diversity: “It is only a bilingual who can really show us what there is to learn from the way the world is mapped and classified in another language” (272). Dalby argues that we need linguistic diversity in order to keep our own language flexible; human creativity depends a great deal on contact with the other ways of conceptualizing reality that other languages represent.

Dalby's book does not seek to be a textbook for a graduate linguistics course, and owing to its largely nontechnical approach it would not lend itself well to such a course (for example, the term semi-speakers, a technical term in the linguistic literature, is defined simply as “people who know only a little of the traditional language” [248]). The book does, however, succeed in presenting its topic in an engaging and thoughtful way to the general educated public, and as such it is a very recommendable volume and an enjoyable read.