Spoken Here

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.
Abley delves deep into why some languages are fading into oblivion, while some endangered languages continue to thrive. His mission in Spoken Here 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.

Mark Abley, an award-winning journalist, writes for the Montreal Gazette, the Times Literary Supplement, and other publications. He speaks English, French, and a little Welsh. His previous book, Spoken Here, was named a Best Book of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle and Discover magazine. He won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005 for work on language change and the future.