Tuesday, September 15, 2015

A Play by David Crystal

David Crystal, a fairly prolific linguist who has written a great number of books on topics such as language death, historical linguistics, clinical linguistics, has also written - back in the 1990s - a play. The play deals with the topic of language death. It is obviously a dramatization of the topic, and deals with a rather traumatic form of language death (that of a tribe being devastated by disease) - but still, it manages, I suspect, to give a good hint at the experience of being the last speaker of a language rather well.

For people with an interest in linguistics, however, parts of it does read a bit like an info-dump. However, for most people I guess the info-dump might be genuine news. The bits that are impressive generally deal with the character Shalema, the last speaker of his language.

The manuscript is available for interested readers here.

No comments:

Post a Comment