Mark Abley is a Canadian poet of Welsh descent who has recently been travelling the world in search of minority languagues which are bleeding to death or, in the case of Welsh, Faroese and Basque, just about succeeding in staunching their gaping wounds. This is an emotive subject for many writers (perhaps especially for poets), the fact that every year, somewhere in the world, the last wheelchair-bound speaker of some native tongue is probably expiring somewhere in a nursing home, surrounded by middle-aged socio-linguists with highly sensitive voice recorders, as he takes with him those 27 different words which somehow manage to mean, by some miracle of mouth-gapingly ancient linguistic contrivance, mist-partially-rising-over-pre-dawn-snow.
How much the poorer the world will be once all that is lost! And so, understandably enough, the tone of this book is lyrical, if not threnodic, much of the time — a long keening over the unstoppable march of, God blast its very name, English, that undiscriminating, pot-bellied Wal-Mart of world languages.
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