Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages

Part a travel book and part a book of languages, Mark Abley’s Spoken Here is an informal travelogue through the regionalisms of the spoken word. While some languages, notably English, have enjoyed unprecedented expansion and use over the last several decades, other languages have fallen into obscurity. Some have even given way to extinction. In this book, Abley takes us through the predicaments of better-known cases of falling languages like Yiddish and Welsh, but also explores forgotten and purely regional tongues like Australia’s Murrinh-Patha and Mi’kmaq, from Eastern Canada and Maine.