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Book Title: Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages Date of issue: April 4th 2005 ISBN: 0618565833 ISBN 13: 9780618565832 The author of the book: Mark Abley Language: English Format files: PDF The size of the: 786 KB Edition: Mariner Books

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In Spoken Here, Mark Abley takes us on a world tour from the Arctic Circle to Oklahoma to Australia in a fervent quest to document some of the world's most endangered languages. His mission is urgent: Of the six thousand languages spoken in the world today, only six hundred may survive into the next century. Abley visits the exotic and frequently remote locales that are home to fading languages and constructs engaging and entertaining portraits of some of the last living speakers of these tongues. Throughout this exhilarating travelogue, he points out that the same forces that put biological species at risk -- development, globalization, loss of habitat -- are also threatening human languages, and with them, something very basic about their speakers' cultures.

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Read information about the author

Mark Abley was born in England in 1955. As a small child his family moved to Canada, and he grew up in northern Ontario, southern Alberta and central Saskatchewan. He studied literature at the University of Saskatchewan and, after winning a Rhodes Scholarship, at St. John’s College, Oxford. As a young man Mark travelled in more than twenty countries in Europe and Asia. Aspiring to be a poet, he began work as a freelance writer.

In 1983 Mark and his wife moved to Montreal. His first book, Beyond Forget: Rediscovering the Prairies, appeared in 1986. A year later he embarked on the adventure of parenthood and also joined the staff of the Montreal Gazette. He spent sixteen years there, working as a feature writer, book-review editor and literary columnist. His reviews and articles won him the National Newspaper Award for critical writing, and, following a trip to Ethiopia, Djibouti and Somaliland, he was nominated for an NNA in international reporting. Along the way he also wrote three books of poetry and the text of a children’s picture book, Ghost Cat. He returned to freelance writing in 2003, though he continues to write a regular column on language for the Gazette. It appears every second Saturday under the headline “Watchwords.”

His book Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages appeared in 2003. It has been translated into French, Spanish and Japanese, and earned praise from reviewers in many countries. But the responses that most delighted Mark came from readers who said that the book inspired them to keep fighting for their own language and culture. After winning a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005, Mark began work on a project looking at the amazing changes in the spoken and written language of our time: from hip-hop to Singlish, text-messaging to Spanglish. The result is his 2008 book The Prodigal Tongue: Dispatches From the Future of English.

His latest book, Camp Fossil Eyes: Digging for the Origins of Words, appeared in the summer of 2009 from Annick Press. It aims to make etymology — the history of words — accessible and intriguing to children between about 9 and 13. (Much to Mark’s surprise, it was recently translated into Korean.) After this book appeared, he accepted an offer from McGill-Queen’s University Press to work there part-time as an acquisition editor.

Mark has been a writer, an editor and a guest speaker in the Creative Non-Fiction program of the Banff Centre for the Arts; he has read from his work at festivals and universities in Japan, Britain, the United States and most provinces of Canada. Despite his dislike of winter he continues to live in suburban Montreal, a few minutes’ walk from the banks of the St. Lawrence River. He is married with two daughters and three cats.

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