The world’s most exotic languages are vanishing in a puff of smoke

It is one of academia’s horrible ironies that linguistics, the subject devoted to human communication, has managed to communicate nothing about its many startling and fundamental discoveries to the world outside its university departments. So any book such as this linguistic tour of some of the world’s exotic, hidden and endangered languages is to be welcomed with sobbing gratitude.

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Almost all the languages Lorna Gibb describes are staples of linguistics course books, but I’m assuming each will come as startling news to a general readership. One which was new to me was the sign language used by native north Americans throughout the Great Plains, and thanks to Gibb, I also now know how to interpret their smoke signals: two puffs = all is well; three puffs = help!; four puffs = stranded whale.

As only linguists would expect, this tour of the linguistically weird and wonderful soon stops off at one of the lesser visited Canary Islands, Gomera, home to the whistled language known as El Silbo. It has a range of more than a kilometre (about ten times that of a shout), and its differing whistles remarkably convey not only phonemes but grammatical features such as the tenses of verbs and the gender of nouns.

Linguists will also be unshocked to see that another of Gibb’s destinations is the group of Khoisan languages in southern Africa which use various click sounds. I say various – Nama has 20 different clicks, almost all indistinguishable to our ears but as obvious to a Naman speaker as an ‘f’ is from a ‘p’ to us. So that, for example, in Khoikhoi, ‘lam’ can denote verbs meaning ‘to demolish’ and ‘to light’, the adjective ‘exclusive’ and the noun ‘clap’, depending on the different click indicated by that ‘l’.