In an interview on Language

Let’s move on to your second choice, Helena Drysdale’s book about the 18 months she spent travelling across Europe with her family to discover more about its stateless tribes.

It’s a good book to segue onto after Empires of the Word. In a sense it says the same thing, but by a different means. Drysdale clearly feels that we should care about dying or moribund languages, for the same reason that we should care when a species of plant or animal dies and the diversity of our planet is reduced.

I happen to like travel writing a lot as a genre, and this is a travel book which has a linguistic thread running through it. It works extremely well just as a travel book, because she goes to lots of off-the-beaten-track places. She’s attracted to the ethnically confused borderlands and edgelands of Europe, where so-called “minority languages” are spoken. The indigenous inhabitants have a visceral, romantic, embattled, nationalistic spirit. We’re talking about people like the Bretons, the Corsicans, the Lapps and the Basques. It’s a very original idea for a travel book. I read it a few years ago when I was travelling through the Baltic states and then on to Russia – looking at those countries in the hangover of Soviet influence, and the way the indigenous languages were used. It was an interesting backdrop.

It’s a very ambitious mix of travelogue, politics and anthropology, written in a really accessible way. Again, this is a book I stumbled upon and it exceeded my expectations. It was also just different from my expectations, and that’s exciting. It’s a meticulously researched book, but it’s also very funny about the misunderstandings between communities and the quirks of these embattled nationalist figures. And it’s quite an impressive feat of travel. She covers a lot of ground, goes to places which aren’t necessarily on the tourist map, be they Macedonia or northern Finland, and her findings are really quite surprising.