Spoken Here

Travels Among Threatened Languages

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by Mark Abley and Mary Abley

Houghton Mifflin

Due/Published April 2005, 336 pages, paper

ISBN 0618565833

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 the homes of fading languages, and constructs engaging and entertaining portraits of some of the last living speakers of these tongues. 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. Throughout this exhilarating travelogue, "Abley deals not only in words but in the people who speak them, and he does so vividly and eloquently" (Chicago Sun-Times).