Mark Abley: Spoken Here

We all love the warm cuddly idea of rescuing endangered species of animal and plant life. This engaging book makes an equally compelling case for preserving a less tangible diversity, that of threatened languages.

Abley is a newspaperman and takes a journalistic approach to his defence of minority tongues, interviewing a wide range of defenders across the battlefront. He talks to those fighting for aboriginal languages in Australia and to those who preserved the Manx language, a task reminiscent of saving the black robin. On route, he visits Provence and ponders the fate of Yiddish.

His journey is enlivened by brilliant touches of colour from the rich palette of language. He quotes vocabularies which include words as specific as "to create a pinching sensation in the armpit" and other tongues where a limited armoury of words can be combined to produce infinite subtleties of meaning. There are grammatical constructions which set most Western usages into reverse and there are clusters of consonants that make the English speaker's tongue lock on sight. He even includes a reference to how Tolkien constructed Elvish.

But his serious point is that languages can reflect a way of thinking based on a totally different set of assumptions about how the world works, about humanity's place within it and about the nature of human relationships.

As a Canadian, a country with an acrimonious history of a minority language fighting against what one of his subjects calls the killer language of English, Abley brings a committed attitude towards his subject and displays admiration for Maori as an example of how a people can rally to a language despite historic obstacles. However, despite the affection that Abley lavishes on both the threatened languages and their doughty supporters, there is an unmistakable air of melancholy about the book. The success stories are, in reality, few and their victories are precarious.

Despite the importance of language to cultural values, the tide of major tongues — such as French against Provencal and English on a global scale — make the struggles Abley illustrates uphill affairs.

Political will, the dedication of the native speakers and considerable amounts of state funding help and there can be a certain amount of compulsion although, as he points out in case of the Irish, mandatory language provisions can backfire.

He produces a depressingly similar series of anecdotes, familiar to a Maori readership, of minority tongues being forbidden on pain of punishment in school. But that makes it a tricky task also to defend the legitimacy of imposing minority language on political grounds.

The benefits of bi-lingualism for children are increasingly unchallenged, but history makes clear that languages survive or fall on the basis of utility. Unused languages will, for all their spiritual worth, be museum pieces or academic exercises. Determined efforts can stop a language from dying but only its own speakers can make it live.