Death in the Rainforest by Don Kulick

 I am on a non-fiction kick these days and so when I read a review of a book on a subject that I know nothing about, I put it on my library hold list, and this is one such book.  The loss of language is like all the other extinctions we will be watching unfold, and understanding what we lose when that happens is well worth thinking about.
As a young anthropologist, in 1985, Don Kulick, the author of this book, traveled to the most remote reaches of Papua New Guinea to study how a language dies. Motivating his quest was a haunting consensus then emerging among linguists that fully half of the world’s 7,000 languages are teetering on the brink of extinction. As he made his way across the vast mangrove lagoon at the mouth of the Sepik River, wading through malarial swamps to reach a narrow slit in the jungle that would be his home for many months, he was acutely aware that every fortnight, somewhere in the world, some elder carries into the grave the last syllables of an ancient tongue, and another language is lost. His destination was the village of Gapun, home to just 130 people, 90 of whom were fluent in Tayap, one of 600 extant languages kept alive by fewer than 100 speakers.
Papua New Guinea, a nation the size of California with a population of 8 million, has more than a thousand distinct languages—not dialects, but actual languages, 350 of which have never been spoken by more than 500 people.  He went back over the next three decades and what he has to say about his experiences are like nothing I have read before.  Honest, frightening, and enlightening.