Three cheers for Boro

Mark Abley charts the the relentless march of English around the globe in Spoken Here. Chris Lavers wants to call a halt
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Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages
by Mark Abley
322pp, Heinemann, £14.99

This book touched me, perhaps because its author and I study essentially the same thing: variety. The objects of Mark Abley's passion are languages; mine, species. We both love diversity yet find ourselves chronicling extinction, the process by which our subject matter is fading away. Ironic, really. Had I known, as a six-year-old staring with awe into a jam jar of squiggly pond life, that it would turn out like this, I probably would have tipped the whole lot back and become a plumber. Still, there is hope, for languages and for life, even if the news is not encouraging for either.

Around 6,000 languages are spoken around the world today. By some estimates, only half are likely to survive to the end of this century and only 600 seem truly secure. Languages, like species, have always gone extinct, but the pace of change today is quickening. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of languages may succumb in the lifetimes of our children and grandchildren, most driven to the grave by the linguistic equivalent of the brown rat - English. Our mother tongue is the language of globalisation, and at the moment its spread seems unstoppable.

Resistance to the new lingua franca is widespread, but collaboration will probably turn out to be the more potent force. Abley provides some telling examples. The Far Eastern Economic Review, for example, called English "Asia's premier language", its "unifying tongue and its language of opportunity". Malaysia has a teen magazine called Junior, which consists largely of English lessons. German has admitted "das Web-Design" and "die Bypass-Operation", as if it can no longer be bothered to make up its own words. English is such a sought-after commodity in China that its most flamboyant teacher, Li Yang, can fill a football stadium with eager pupils. "Learning English is a piece of cake!" he yells above a rock'n'roll soundtrack. "Make 300 million Chinese speak fluent English!" Why? Not because the Chinese love the language, Li explains, "but because Coca-Cola and Microsoft rule the world".

Against this backdrop, Abley sets out to explore some of the world's bullied languages and bring back news of their plight (similar tactics worked for the giant panda, after all). The result, if such a construction is possible, is a depressing joy. If we are not careful, the world could lose Circassian, a Caucasian language with 48 consonants and at most two vowels (and possibly none - experts disagree).

We have already lost another whose last recorded speaker was a parrot (though I reckon the Amazonian natives were pulling Alexander von Humboldt's leg on this one). Boro, a language spoken in northeastern India and parts of Bhutan, Nepal and Bangladesh, is graced by the verbs gobray , "to fall into a well unknowingly" (is there any other way?), and egthu, "to create a pinching sensation in the armpit". Ever since I can remember, I've needed the Boro verb asusu, "to feel unknown and uneasy in a new place". A language with a one-word verb for "to love for the last time" simply cannot be allowed to die.

Many of the languages explored in Spoken Here are unlikely to survive much longer, but others are resisting, and in these we see the main reasons for hope. English may be the language of opportunity, but once opportunity arrives, and with it the time and freedom to think about less prosaic matters, cultural pride often begins to reassert itself. Manx officially died with its last native speaker in 1974, but is now making a comeback. No child in the world spoke Hebrew as a mother tongue in 1880, but many now do. Nothing can stop the steamroller of English, it seems, but being flattened doesn't necessarily mean death for a language.

Many people don't care if languages go extinct any more than they care about giant pandas, and if you subscribe to this view Spoken Here will leave you cold. But if you instinctively inveigh against blandness and uniformity, this is an essential read. And with a bit of luck it should also give a boost to the fledgling rearguard action for Boro.

· Chris Lavers is the author of Why Elephants Have Big Ears (Phoenix)