Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages

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.

• Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World
• Language Death (Canto Classics)
• An Introduction to the Languages of the World
• White Teeth: A Novel
• Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle (Vintage Departures)
• Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages
• Dying Words: Endangered Languages and What They Have to Tell Us
• Language and Culture (Oxford Introductions to Language Study)
• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
• The Last Speakers: The Quest to Save the World's Most Endangered Languages