Spoken Here
Travels Among Threatened Languages

Publisher:  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Date Written:  06/08/2003
Year Published:  2003  
Pages:  336pp   ISBN:  978-0618236497
In Spoken Here, Mark Abley takes us on a world tour from the Arctic Circle to Oklahoma to Australia in a fervent quest to document some of the world's most endangered languages. His mission is urgent: Of the six thousand languages spoken in the world today, only six hundred may survive into the next century. Abley visits the exotic and frequently remote locales that are home to fading languages and constructs engaging and entertaining portraits of some of the last living speakers of these tongues. Throughout this exhilarating travelogue, he points out that the same forces that put biological species at risk -- development, globalization, loss of habitat -- are also threatening human languages, and with them, something very basic about their speakers' cultures.

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Table of Contents


Patricks Language 1
Dreamers Languages in Northern Australia 13
Constructing the World 43
Unseen and Unheard Yuchi 53
Dont Vori Bi Khepi 83
Leaving the Grave Manx 95
The Verbs of Boro 121
The Lions Tongue Provencal 128
Melting at the Edges 156
Humboldts Parrot 190
Ways of Escape Yiddish 201
Revival 229
The Iron of Language Welsh 240
The Face of All the Earth 272
Sources 283
Acknowledgments 299
Index 303


The Words That Come Before All Else Mohawk
163