Dying Words: Endangered Languages and What They Have To Tell Us is a book about the supremely human creation of language, in all its forms and intricacies. It isn’t a book that stands back and proclaims the imminent death of languages, but rather looks down into the crevices of language and what it means to us, to societies, and to communities whose languages are hanging by a rapidly fraying thread. It also serves to describe (although only scratch the surface of) the diversity of thought, meaning and culture embedded within languages not as a eulogy to something passing but as a living, breathing entity.

A word about the author: Dying Words is written by Nicholas Evans, one of the preeminent linguists in Australian linguistics, and perhaps one of the most established living researchers of Australian languages and a great spokesperson for the cause of language endangerment around the globe. He also happens to be the head of the Department of Linguistics at the Australian National University. His commitment and sincere interest in the plight of endangered languages is perhaps seen most obviously in the cover of the book, Sweers Island 2008 by the Bentnick Island Artists – painted in 2008 by collectively by every remaining speaker of the Kayardild language, a language and community with which he has worked for well over 20 years, and whose population is now below 10.

The book is broken into five main thematic sections, each broken further into chapters:

The Library of Babel which draws on the image of a language library to describe numerically the diversity of languages of the world, and how the world has changed in the last several hundred years both in aid of and to the determent of language diversity.

A Great Feast of Languages looks at the ways in which languages differ – sounds, grammar and meaning, then looking at the social level of language; kinship, social relations and “[how] speakers keep track of their social universe” (47)

Faint Tracks in an Ancient Wordscape: Languages and Deep World History looks, as it suggests, looks into the history of language and what ancient languages have to tell us about language today, and describes some of the techniques employed by linguists in reconstructing long silent languages.

Ratchetting Each Other Up: The Coevolution of Language, Culture and Thought an amazing section on the relationship of language and thought, boiling one of the most complex ideas in linguistics down to a fascinating and enlightening look at “Trellises of the Mind” and a revealing look at the way art, language and the mind intersect.

Listening While We Can the final section of the book looks at what can and is being done to protect and revive endangered languages as well as looking at some of the complexities of field research of endangered languages.

Dying Words is a linguistics book for everyone, accessible yet deep, informative, and most of all is a good read. It sets out the variety and amazing insights on offer from the world’s endangered languages in a way which teaches you a lot about the languages, their speakers, and why the need to save such languages is becoming more pressing with each passing day – and you probably won’t notice, but you’ll be learning quite a lot of linguistic theory along the way!

Evans can take you away in the most complex linguistic theorem, and bring you back feeling like you went on a journey that wasn’t difficult as much as it was enchanting, and it’s through these encounters that the most interesting insights from languages around the world are found in this book. There is the expectation that you at least have some basic understanding of the workings of language – know what a noun, verb, or adjective is for example – but beyond that everything is spelled out pretty clearly. His experience with a critically endangered Australian language – Kayardild – shines through and his insights into the social and linguistic workings of the society lend great insight into his observations not only about the Kayardild people but of the plight of those experiencing language loss around the world.

This book is about the full gamut of what we lose when languages die, about why it matters, and about what questions and techniques best shape our response to this looming collapse of human ways of knowing…[B]ecause we can only meet this challenge through a concerted effort by linguists, the communities themselves, and the lay public, I have tried to writ this book in a way that speaks to all these types of reader.
Dying Words: xviii-xix.

Dying Words is not intended to be a linguistic reference manual, nor is it intended to be a guide to language endangerment (of which there are already many.) It is a book which is first and foremost a book to be read, and one which I thoroughly enjoyed reading. It is a reference book with a thread of story weaved through, bringing with it a sense of the enormity of language and what it means to mankind. If you have an interest in language, or are curious about what’s out there outside the languages you’re familiar with, I strongly recommend this book.

The book is published by Wiley and available now through them and a number of online bookstores such as Amazon.

So I’m not going to talk about the discussions or outcomes of the Future Summit, but rather focus on its use of Twitter as a broadcast and interaction medium and what I took from this. I’ll start by saying one very important thing: I wasn’t there. I was relying almost completely on the Twitter feed provided by a number of very dedicated and clued on Twitter personalities who did a great job.

The idea behind the Future Summit feed was (from what I’ve read) about trying to remove existing media hierarchies. This meant bypassing newspapers – too slow & bureaucratic; blogs – also too slow; television – not interactive. This left Twitter, the microblogging service taking the world by storm at the moment. What it also left us with was a 140 character limit.

As great a job as the Twitter correspondents were doing during the two day summit, though, I still don’t feel that I have a really well developed sense of what was said there. 140 characters, it must be said, doesn’t replace a full video feed. It also doesn’t replace blogs. It is, primarily, an interaction medium. There have been many events – really serious events – which have been covered by Twitter in very meaningful and constructive ways. I think in the vast majority of these cases, Twitter has been used as an interaction medium rather than a broadcast medium.

I think the tweet above demonstrates what I’m trying to say here – there’s a very broad brushstroke idea of what is being said, but it leaves more questions than it does answers. More often than not, the nuances of argument which were no doubt taking place at the Future Summit were lost in translation to 140 characters, and although it’s been noted that approximately half the questions asked of presenters at the summit came directly from Twitter, I suspect many of them digressed somewhat from the issue at hand due only to the fact that most people reading the Twitter stream would have had no idea what was actually being argued.

The best interaction I’ve seen with broadcasting, Twitter, and interaction is the interaction between tweeters during television shows (Stephen Conroy appearing on QandA a but over a month ago comes to mind). I think that with this in mind, the inclusion of a video stream of the Future Summit combined with the already established Twitter correspondents would be a great way to get people involved and interested in what’s happening. Rather than focusing on simply reporting the events of the summit, the Twitter contingent could then focus on being the mediators between the world of Twitter and the conference without needing to summarise very complex ideas into 140 characters for mass consumption.

That said, @futuresummit being reserved for some kind of coverage as was already present would also be good.

Overall, I get where the organizers of the Future Summit were coming from with this idea, and it is a good idea. I think the best (albiet old) idea here is that we don’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater – lets not throw out old media completely in place of new media, because new media in many ways has grown out of traditional media forms such as television and video, and doesn’t quite work 100% without it.

The header images have been fixed (on the main page – the actual document view has been overlooked so far, but I’m guessing that’s an accident, so a heads up here ) and the menu is much easier to see. The Flash form is still there, but I’ve been told that it too might be on its way out, or at least a viable HTML alternative will be added. These are all good changes, and thank you TwitDoc for implementing them!

I uploaded a document to the service, and it is a great service. Another example of the power of Twitter apps, and the fact that 140 characters can really be stretched to contain a lot – a whole document, book or presentation in this case.

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On the advice of @geehall1 (via his blog) , I decided to check out a new third-party Twitter service, TwitDoc.

Basically it’s a service that allows you to upload documents of various formats and share them on Twitter. In theory. But I haven’t used it yet. I didn’t get far enough without feeling compelled to write a blog post about my first impressions. So here’s a list for your viewing pleasure:

1. The Logo – My first impressions of the page “that bird looked a bit laggy…how big’s the file? Wait. Why is it so aliased? Oh god. Please do not tell me that it’s a big image. No… Please no.”Ok that’s probably a bit overstated, but honestly, why is the bird on the page a 1058x1226px, 120kb PNG file? I know most people are using broadband these days, but it’s unnecessary, unprofessional looking and wastes peoples’ bandwidth. The same goes for the header text image, which isn’t as big, but in my opinion, never make the browser resize an image because it’ll never do a job as good as you will.
2. The Menu – Ok, so maybe the logo and header image got a bit too much of my attention, but I almost missed the navigation menu directly under it. It’s not too bad, but a few shades darker on the colour wouldn’t hurt in my opinion.
3. Flash – Flash is great. It’s opened up the internet to lots of different ways of creating content, animations and other things. Flash has not, and will not for the forseeable future, replace HTML. If you put a form into a web page, make it a standards compliant, non-Flash form. If you want to then add a JS based Flash replacement to the upload box, by all means go ahead, but if I happen to want to upload a file from my phone (which I can’t – hypotheticals people!) which doesn’t support Flash, I’m screwed. I’ll get the bandwidth sucking images over the 3G network, and “Alternate HTML content should be placed here.” Not very useful.

These are all, clearly, my personal opinions. From an accessibility standpoint, I think the site is a trainwreck, and until I have confidence that people can access the site I’m not really interested in storing my documents with it — or giving it my Twitter credentials.