Preface to the Second Edition vi Acknowledgments for the First Edition ix Prologue xiv About the Companion Website xx Part I The Library of Babel 1 1 Warramurrungunji’s Children 5 2 Four Millennia to Tune In 24 Part II a Great Feast of Languages 45 3 A Galapagos of Tongues 49 4 Your Mind in Mine: Social Cognition in Grammar 70 Part III Faint Tracks in An Ancient Wordscape: Languages and Deep World History 83 5 Sprung from Some Common Source 85 6 Travels in the Logosphere: Hooking Ancient Words onto Ancient Worlds 105 7 Keys to Decipherment: How Living Languages Can Unlock Forgotten Scripts 129 Part IV Ratchetting Up Each Other: the Coevolution of Language, Culture, and Thought 153 8 Trellises of the Mind: How Language Trains Thought 157 9 What Verse and Verbal Art Can Weave 185 Part V On the Brink 205 10 Listening While We Can 207 Part VI Afterword 231 Epilogue: In the Shade of the Casuarina 233 Outro: Reawakening the Word 236 References 255 Maps 280 Index of Languages and Language Families 284 Index 290

Praise for the Prior Edition: “This is a wonderful book. Evans canvases many issues in the nature and culture of language, languages and linguistics and the relations between these studies and other disciplines, particularly cognitive science and archaeology. … This is story telling of the highest quality.” Iain Davidson, Aboriginal History “Evans’s book is one of the most penetrating and insightful works we have had on language for years. It does not deserve to be relegated to a specialist literature on language endangerment when its subject is the very essence of human language and its diversity: the life and growth of languages, not their death and demise.” Nick Enfield, Current Anthropology “Of all the books on language disappearance that have appeared in the last decade, [it] is intellectually the most challenging and the most persuasive. Evans sets out to show why linguistic diversity is an essential part of what makes us human.” Mark Abley, Times Literary Supplement “The inherent beauty of these small languages is what shines through over all else in Evans’ writing … the best book I’ve yet seen in terms of its potential to persuade the broader public of the need to value endangered languages and to support the fight to keep them in daily use.” David Harmon, Language Documentation and Conservation In the new, thoroughly revised second edition of Words of Wonder: Endangered Languages and What They Tell Us (formerly called Dying Words: Endangered Languages and What They Have to Tell Us), renowned scholar Nicholas Evans addresses the impact of mass language endangerment on the world’s “Library of Babel.” He explores issues surrounding the preservation of indigenous languages including the most effective ways to respond to the challenges of recording and documenting fragile oral traditions while they’re still with us. This latest edition includes an entirely new chapter on new developments in language revitalisation such as the impact of technology on language archiving, the use of social media, and autodocumentation by speakers. It also includes new sections on how recent innovations in language documentation give us a fuller picture of human linguistic diversity. Seeking to answer the question of why widespread linguistic diversity exists in the first place, the book weaves in portraits of individual “last speakers” and anecdotes about linguists and their discoveries. Readers will also have access to a companion website with sound files and embedded video clips of various languages mentioned in the text. Perfect for undergraduate and graduate students studying language endangerment and preservation and for any reader who wants to discover what the full diversity of the world’s languages has to teach us, Words of Wonder: Endangered Languages and What They Tell Us, Second Edition, is for all with a professional or personal interest in endangered languages and, beyond that, in the full wealth of the world’s tongues.