Spoken Here: travels among threatened languages, by Mark Abley

Much more than just a way of speaking

We are living in an age of homogenisation. Birds, butterflies, beetles: everywhere, the slender sweet, fragile ones seem to be going under and their places taken by a few toughies. The same process is going on in language. About 90 per cent of the world's 6,000 or so languages will be dead in a decade or two, as a bunch of super-tongues headed up by Mandarin, Spanish and English muscle their way into everyone's mouths. Snaking up rivers in Latin America, sliding down TV antennae into villages in Central Asia, they extend their tendrils into every last corner.

We shed a fake tear, but mostly think this is fine. One of the few Bible stories almost everyone knows is the Tower of Babel, whose moral is that God gave us loads of languages as a curse. As Mark Abley explains in this riveting exploration of disappearing languages, the problem is the way we are conditioned to see language in mechanical terms. As he says, there is much more to a language than words. When people forget their language, countless other elements disappear.

Abley shows how certain Yiddish words are accompanied by thrusts of the head, opening of the palms, slight smiles that serve "to sweeten an insult or soften a criticism". So when Yiddish goes, we lose a whole way of talking, which moulds a people's character. Abley cites the truly fascinating thesis of a Hasidic rabbi that, if Israel had adopted the "soft" Yiddish language over the "hard" Hebrew one, the country's history might have followed a totally different track.

Abley seems to have been everywhere and spoken to everyone. He is at his most interesting on the linguistic desecration of South America, Australia and New Guinea, where the people of almost every valley have their own language: not dialect, language. He packs his account with analogies drawn from expiring animals and birds that inhabit the same landscapes as threatened languages. I knew about dodos and great auks. But Abley prefers comparisons with, say, the Banff springs snail, whose survival depends on five ponds in Canada being maintained at the right temperature and PH balance. Get the picture?

I had one, tiny quibble, when Abley touched down in the Isle of Man. I happen to have met most of the people he spoke to, and was less impressed by their talk of a Manx Gaelic revival. About 14,000 people spoke Manx in the 1870s; a few hundred do today. As Abley wrote, very convincingly, countless gestures and stresses accompanying words make up the body of a language. The words are just the bones. What was the point of people re-learning a language whose last native speaker died in the 1970s? So what if they can mouth the words?

Celts aside, this is an impressive book: learned, thought-provoking, bouncing with ideas, yet funny and wry. Abley's passion for his subject is inspiring.

Marcus Tanner

'Ireland's Holy Wars' by the reviewer is published by Yale