The Linguist

28 The Linguist Vol/63 No/3 thelinguist.uberflip.com REVIEWS to the herders' way of life, their culture and nomenclature will be lost. Seke is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Nepal where the glaciers are melting, landslides are frequent and farmers are looking to new horizons. The Seke people are leaving their high-altitude villages for high-rise flats in New York City. Of its total 700 speakers, 50 now live in a single housing block in Brooklyn. Before migration, the nearest village took two days to reach by horse; now it is two stops on the subway. Still come the tired, poor and huddled masses to this "archipelago of last resort". Jobs are in nail bars, nannying, cooking, construction. The Himalayan diaspora watches Bollywood films and ends up speaking a Tibetan-Nepali-Hindi-English pidgin, nicknamed Ramaluk ('half goat, half sheep'). Language City author Ross Perlin, of the Endangered Language Alliance, works with immigrant Rasmina to compile dictionaries, analyse grammar and transcribe recorded conversations. Will Seke survive as a living language, he asks. If its young speakers remain in Nepal, perhaps. Those with a toehold in New York may disperse, and without a diasporic critical mass it will perish within a lifetime. Yiddish is bullish by comparison. At its peak in 1920s America a million-plus immigrants spoke the fusion of Hebrew, German and Slavic languages. Their descendants are acculturated, and in Europe numbers plummeted following the Holocaust and pogroms. Perlin tells the story of Boris, who came to Manhattan via Bessarabia, Moscow and Israel. He revived Forverts, a newspaper akin to a fanzine in which Yiddish is the subject of adoration. Supporters it has, but native speakers are really what it needs. In Language City: The fight to preserve endangered mother tongues, I happened upon 'shlepped', 'hustler' and 'badasses', and thought I'd been force-migrated into an episode of Seinfeld. The author does the native New Yorker routine as well as the serious, academic research. I learnt much and only occasionally did it feel like a lecture (e.g. English is a 'killer' language). Strangely, there is not a single Jewish joke. That warm, wise humour would have been a shot of arak to this reader. Graham Elliott MCIL Language City Ross Perlin Grove Press, 2024 415 pp; ISBN 9781804710715 Paperback £12.99 A pastoral, nomadic tribe in Siberia has a word (dongur) that means 'a domestic, male reindeer in its third year and first mating season, but not ready to mate'. This Turkic language, Tofa, is spoken by fewer than 100 people and moribund. When its remaining, elderly speakers die, so will the language. The spoken repository of knowledge yoked UÉÉ~á The underlying premise of The Language Puzzle: How we talked our way out of the Stone Age is that the origin of human speech is a complex puzzle comprising numerous different pieces. Thanks to recent advances in the social sciences, many of these pieces are much better understood than they were a few decades ago. Some significant gaps remain, however, and in this book Steven Mithen sets out to fill them and complete the picture. His approach is to provide us with detailed chapters on each of the disciplines involved in our understanding of language and then bring them together in an overarching evolutionary narrative. This stretches from the earliest hominins' prehistoric hoots and screeches to the complex, finely honed instrument you are reading at this moment. These disciplines include archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, genetics, ethology and neuroscience. Mithen makes an admirable effort to bring the lay reader up to speed in each of these complex subjects, a task he deems necessary to be able to grasp the bigger picture. This proves to be both a help and a hindrance. The level of detail can be overwhelming: a seven-page description of the functioning of the human heart, for instance, or a crash course on the intricacies of DNA, might seem excessive to some readers. The author's background is in archaeology, The Language Puzzle Steven Mithen Profile Books, 2024 544 pp; ISBN: 9781800811584 Hardback £25 not linguistics, and at times this is noticeable. His rash dismissal of Noam Chomsky's crucially important ideas on language origin and acquisition is scantily argued and unconvincing, while the other great theorist of language evolution in this century, Daniel Everett, does not even get a mention. A work on this scale will inevitably contain some imprecisions, however, and overall The Language Puzzle provides a well-written overview of the state of the art in this field, including numerous case studies and cross- references among the subjects involved. The paucity of hard data forces Mithen to rely on speculation as much as all the other writers who have tackled this subject. He may, therefore, fall short of his avowed goal of solving the language puzzle and proving how language drove humanity's development towards civilisation, but that does not make his multidisciplinary endeavour any less worth reading. Ross Smith MCIL CL

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