Foreword

Summary

An invitation to write a foreword for an important book is always a singular honor, but in this case it's also something quite personal, for Lyle Campbell is and has always been one of my heroes, a rare scholar who throughout his career resisted the pressures of academic orthodoxy to do the work that he knew to be vitally important.

As a chronicler of the imagination, Lyle has devoted his life to the celebration and revitalization of what is arguably humanity's greatest legacy, our astonishing linguistic diversity, the seven thousand languages that encode the totality of our collective experience. As this book marvelously recounts, Lyle embraced his mission with both humor and joy, not to mention considerable wisdom and humility. Modest to a fault, he would be the last to agree with my assertion that his unflagging support for language documentation and fieldwork over the last half century has been of truly historic significance. But he would be wrong. His presence has been that important.

In 1992 Michael Krauss, then head of the Alaska Native Language Center in Fairbanks, published one of the most important and disturbing academic papers ever written. Based in part on his address the year before to the Linguistic Society of America, his paper “The World's Languages in Crisis” began with a litany of loss. Among the Eyak of the Copper River delta of Alaska, where Krauss had worked, there remained but two speakers of the language, both elderly. The Mandan of the Dakotas had but six fluent speakers, the Osage five, the Abenaki-Penobscot twenty, the Iowa five, the Tuscarora fewer than thirty, the Yokuts fewer than ten. Altogether some six hundred extant languages survive with fewer than a hundred speakers. Over 3,500 of the world's languages, Krauss reported, are kept alive by a fifth of 1 percent of the global population.

My background in anthropology notwithstanding, I was astonished to learn that fully half the languages of the world are not being taught to children. Within the linguistic community I could find no source to challenge Krauss's bleak assessment. This academic consensus was itself haunting. When I spoke to Ken Hale, an eminent linguist at MIT, he agreed without hesitation that 50 percent of the world's languages were endangered.