The Fall of Babel.('Language in Danger')

Genghis Khan massacred the populations of whole cities as he built his Mongol empire. But in 1227, when his son avenged his death by ordering the slaying of the Central Asian Tangut people, he destroyed a whole culture, as the local Tangut language was never again spoken. The world now loses a language every two weeks, a rate unprecedented in history. Of course, not all meet such a violent end. Two lively and accessible new books, Andrew Dalby's "Language in Danger" and "The Power of Babel" by John McWhorter, map the intricate combination of politics, genocide, geography and economics that more typically conspire in their demise-- and ask whether we are losing a testament to human creativity that rivals great works of art.

Linguists estimate that in 100 years fewer than half the world's 6,000 languages will still be in use. Will this mean a more peaceful, communicative world or an arid linguistic desert, subject to the tyranny of the monoglot yoke? In answering this question, Dalby and McWhorter take us on a fascinating and colorful spin through history, chronicling the rise of empires and crisscrossing the globe to take in the indigenous tribes of west Africa, Tasmania and the Amazon, tracking down itinerant healers in Bolivia, whale hunters off the coast of Germany, Russian immigrants in New York--in short, anyone who can cast light on the unique ways people communicate.

McWhorter likens linguistic change to Darwin's theory of evolution, arguing that languages, like animals and plants, inevitably split into subvarieties, alter in response to environmental pressures and evolve new forms and useless features. In prose that is bold and compelling, he warns against seeing grammar as a repository of culture, arguing that it is more often formed by chance and convenience and does not reflect its speakers' world view any more than "a pattern of spilled milk reveals anything specific about the bottle it came from." His theory is slightly undermined by careless errors: a Latin sentence he has composed, on which his first chapter ...