The book of languages

Title: The Book of Languages
Author: Mick Webb
Publisher: Owlkids Books, Canada/USA (2015, originally published in London, UK in 2013)​
Language: English 
ISBN: 978-1771471558​

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This book begins with a world map guide of how to say "hello" in 48 different languages, and ends with a world map guide of how to say "goodbye" in those same languages. A nice touch to get children engaged in the concept that different ways of meeting and greeting people exist in different parts of the world. Being Australian, I naturally zoomed in on Australia which shows a geographically accurate marker for the Indigenous Australian language Noongar which exists (according to this source online) in the southwestern corner of Australia. However, is Noongar the only indigenous language in Australia? Is this language what all Australians speak? (Don't laugh - I've actually had people ask me what language we speak in Australia).

Although the book seems jam packed with nicely laid-out information (and the only review on Amazon gives it five stars for engaging the reviewer's niece), there are other issues that came to my attention. Since I am Australian and have lived half of my adult language in Japan speaking Japanese, I decided to limit my comments to these areas of the book. Despite the Australian indigenous language Noongar being used as an example on the world map, no mention of Australian indigenous languages appear in reference to dying languages or new languages, despite there being a lot of available information on both. To reduce indigenous Australian languages to a passing example on a world map and then ignore them on other maps and written text seems misleading and confusing.

A similar fate seems to have befallen other indigenous languages in the world. Many indigenous languages (for example the Ainu and Ryukyuan languages in Japan) are endangered and yet don't get a mention. In Japan, popular political discourse would have you believe that Japan is a monolingual and monocultural nation, and reading this book does not challenge that notion even on the pages of languages like Korean, Portuguese, and Chinese that have significant ethnic populations in Japan.

Speaking of the Japanese page, I found the treatment of the hiragana alphabet up the side of the page (to the exclusion of katakana) and the brief description of the three scripts (hiragana, katakana and kanji) being used without giving an example makes it difficult to see how written Japanese might look on the page. Every language page gives examples of how to say certain short phrases, but I would have liked to have seen real examples of language - a school notebook excerpt, or street signs, or something to show how certain languages look in the real world.

I certainly like that this kind of book exists - it shows at the very least that there is a diversity of languages in the world. However I feel that this kind of book is a chance to show language, not just just a useful code we apply to our communications with other people, but also as a tool of cultural power and status in the world. Much attention was given to making this book extremely broad and all-encompassing (having said that the index has errors in editing - just check New Zealand and Australia if you want to see what I mean). However, in doing that certain decisions were made to only mention the most widely spoken languages, which sadly does not reflect how languages ebb and sway in the world. Families are bilingual and multilingual - parents struggle to keep their own cultures alive through language, and I think children can take a discussion of this nature through books like these. While students may be motivated to take this book and learn to say "Hello" in 48 different languages, my hope for a book like this is that students will look around them, and notice that these languages (and many others) are all around them, the best hope for ethnic groups to keep their cultures alive within their families.