Dying Words Endangered Languages and What They Have to Tell Us

The next century will see more than half of the world's 6,000 languages become extinct. Most of these will disappear without being adequately recorded. Yet each distills the philosophy, knowledge, and cultural fabric of a different people. This compelling book asks what loss to our collective intellectual heritage will be inflicted by the death of these languages. It brings the conceptual issues vividly to life by weaving in portraits of individual "last speakers" and stories about linguists and their discoveries.

Nicholas Evans is Professor of Linguistics at the Australian National University and a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He is on the editorial boards of the journals Linguistic Typology and Australian Journal of Linguistics, and on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. He is the author of a number of books, including Bininj Gun-wok (2 volumes, 2001), Archaeology and Linguistics: Aboriginal Australia in Global Perspective (co-edited with Patrick McConvell, 1998), and A Grammar of Kayardild (1992).