Dying Words: Endangered Languages and What They Have to Tell Us

Within the next one hundred years half of the world's 6,000 languages that are still spoken will have disappeared. Most of them will die without documentation. Right now, every one of them contains how the people who speak them how they think, what they know and of their culture. This book examines the consequences for our common intellectual and spiritual heritage. Nicholas Evans asks about the loss which this massive loss will be to the world and discovers a number of topics that are of the highest interest while searching for the answer to this question: Why are there so many different languages on this planet? Wouldn't one be enough? What do we know about about the connection between thinking and speaking? Do people think differently in different languages? Can linguistic variation tell us something about the world and its history? How can languages that have not made it to the stage of written documentation before extinction can be documented and why should we do that? Can small languages make it possible to decipher old scripts? Evans is one of the world's most prominent linguists. His book is built on the richness on examples presented in situ, ranging from Australia to Asia, Africa, America and Europe. It yields fascinating insights into the nature of languages. Nicholas Evans's book has been translated into German by Robert Mailhammer.