Languages Of The World: An Introduction, by Asya Pereltsvaig

This book is generally a good one and unsurprisingly a pretty long one, and it seeks to introduce the reader to some of the immense diversity as well as unity within the languages of the world. One of the points that the book makes, sometimes directly but often indirectly, as that isolated languages need not be languages whose qualities are themselves particularly unusual, but are rather ones that have no (known) relatives, particularly ancestors. Throughout the book it is evident that there are both extensive genetic relationships that exist within language families (or subfamilies, or even macrofamilies) as well as extensive areal relationships that exist among languages that often come from different families but which nonetheless share some qualities because they share the same space. Languages frequently develop through isolation and also are dramatically affected by their collisions with other languages as well as by the demands placed upon language learners who often simplify languages when learning them as adults.

Given that this book is a global look at languages, in some ways it is bound to be at least a bit superficial in its examination of any one particular language or language group. The author works hard to present languages that are striking and unusual as well as to portray the difficult situation for small regional languages in many parts of the world like France, Russia, and the United States where languages are dying off at a high rate, in large part due to the monolingual attitudes of the larger populace as a whole and the difficulties of preserving language in an area where the survival of minority tongues is not viewed as a high cultural priority. Still, even though this book is a very surface level account of the linguistic diversity of the world, there are still a lot of poignant reminders of the reality under which many languages exist, where there is what appears to be a marked tendency in the contemporary age for languages, often small and remote languages spoken by indigenous peoples who struggle with remoteness and their relationship with powerful nation-states, to suffer extinction, sometimes before being properly understood and catalogued. The author laments this loss, and it is hard not to lament it along with her.

This book is around 450 pages in length and is divided into 12 chapters. The book begins with a list of figures, list of tables, list of textboxes, list of “focus on” topics, a preface to the third edition, acknowledgements, and abbreviations used in the glosses. After this, the first chapter contains an introduction to the material, examining the difference between languages, dialects, and accents, language families, how language families are established, linguistic diversity, how languages diversify, and field linguistics. Like the rest of the book, there is a focus on a particular topic, in this case language maps, as well as a section for readers to engage in language study themselves. The second chapter of the book then deals with the languages of Europe, starting with the Indo-European language family, the controversy over this family, non-Indo-European languages of Europe (mostly Basque and Finno-Ugric languages), as well as a focus on some of the endangered languages of the continent. The third chapter of the book discusses the languages of Iran and South Asia, which can be divided into the Iranian and Indo-Aryan languages, Dravidian languages, and those of other families (like the Sino-Tibetan and Australasian families). For the fourth chapter, the book discusses Finno-Urgic, other Uralic, Turkic, and other languages of Siberia in the region of Northern Eurasia. The fifth chapter, focusing on the small but linguistically diverse region of the Caucasus, discusses Northwest, Northeast, Kartvelian, and Indo-European languages of the region, along with head-marking and dependent-marking. A discussion of the languages of the Greater Middle East looks at Afroasiatic languages as a whole and then Semitic and Berber languages and language contact in particular (6). The languages of Sub-Saharan Africa are discussed with a look at Nilo-Saharan languages, Niger-Congo languages, and Koisan languages, with a focus on official, trade, and creole languages in the region (7). The languages of Eastern Asia are divided into Sino-Tibetan languages, Austroasiatic languages, Tai-Kedai languages, as well as Japanese and Korean, with a focus on isolating morphology and language change (8). The Austronesian languages form the focus of the following chapter (9), with a look at the discovery of the language family and its homeland (in Taiwan), the internal classification of the family, its linguistic properties, and a focus on the mystery of Malagasy, the language of Madagascar. The aboriginal languages of New Guinea and Australia, looking at Papuan languages as an areal one and not a genealogical one, along with Tok Pisin and the languages of Australia (10) are the subject of the next chapter. -The following chapter discusses the languages of North America, Meso-America, and South America, with a focus on the controversy over the Piraha language (11). The last chapter of the book then deals with various macro-language families, including the well-supported Dene-Yenesian hypothesis, the Altaic and Ural-Altaic macro families (which appear to be more of an areal relationship to many scholars), the Nostratic and Eurasiatic hypotheses and other macro-families, along with sign languages and constructed languages (12). The book then ends with a glossary, bibliography, index of languages, and index of terms.