In this book, David Harrison puts a human face on the dying of languages and, along with it, the loss to civilization of a wealth of human knowledge. Harrison recounts dismal stories told by the last speakers about the impending loss of their language and describes in detail the human cultural heritage that would vanish at their deaths, to show that language death does matter to the modern world.

Chapter 1 describes how the crowding out of small languages by bigger languages with prestige and social and political advantage leads to the unrecoverable loss of knowledge about the natural world accumulated by generations of people. How humans’ perception of the natural world and their survival strategies are encoded linguistically in folk taxonomies of plants and animals is the topic of the following chapter. Chapter 3 showcases the ingenuity of various premodern societies in anchoring their notion of the month to natural events (e.g., fox month, watermelon month) and the phases of the moon. In chapter 4, Harrison takes readers through mountainous terrain, rivers, streams, and tributaries in the mental atlas of elders, which, surprisingly, corresponds closely to modern geographic maps of the region. Harrison also shows how the topographic naming system extends into the grammar of the language, with verbs capturing the slope and direction of wind and river flow. Chapter 5 addresses the fragile nature of oral tradition, using the case of the remote Ös people of central Siberia to illustrate how much of their linguistically encoded knowledge had been forgotten by the time a writing system was developed for their language. In chapters 6 and 7, the question of whether language shapes thought is considered on the basis of numerical and linguistic evidence that Harrison gathered from countless hours of interviewing the last speakers of many languages.

Harrison’s ability to confront the harsh realities faced by speakers of endangered languages comes through in all the numbered chapters, but especially in the five case studies interspersed between them: Tofa reindeer herders losing the ability to talk about reindeer efficiently; nomads of western Mongolia abandoning their language to blend into the urban environment; the Karaim of Lithuania having to use a recorded voice from the past to help them communicate with their deity; the belittling of the Ifugao of the Philippines for their traditional rice technologies; and the newfound pride of a group of Ho schoolchildren in their heritage.

This book will be of interest to researchers working on language contact and change, as well as for readers with an interest in the issue of whether the extinction of the world’s languages leads to the erosion of human knowledge. For researchers and graduate students who wish to delve into the description of dying languages, this book offers good insights into the nature of the fieldwork required and the linguistic and cultural data that can be unearthed.