Reviewed by Sam Feldman

Elizabeth Little has found a new way of looking for America. Trip of the Tongue records the two years she spent on and off the road, driving around the country in search of America’s languages. It may sound like a carefree adventure, but it’s not without a serious side; Little doesn’t shy away from politics, and one of the book’s major themes is the discrimination that minority language communities have faced at the hands of the U.S. government.

The book opens with Little setting out from her home in the polyglot borough of Queens to find languages tucked away in the corners of America. Which languages in particular? Not all of them, certainly; she’s more or less picked out the most eye-catching and interesting — Basque, Norwegian, Navajo and a few other Native languages, and some of the more famous creoles — plus the obligatory Spanish. Each chapter records a visit to one language community; Little visits the annual Basque Festival in Elko, Nevada, for example, and seeks out a Native American tribe in Washington State whose near-extinct language was used in one of the Twilight films.

A longtime language enthusiast, Little is eager to pass along interesting tidbits about the languages she encounters, and the reader is treated to non-technical introductions to linguistic topics like evidentiality (a feature of some languages that requires speakers to say how they learned what they’re saying) and ergative-absolutive languages (which treat the subjects of intransitive verbs in the same way as objects of transitive verbs). She also performs the public service of debunking several persistent linguistic myths. For example, if you’ve ever heard that Congress was at one point, in the 1790s, only one vote away from declaring German our country’s official language, you’ve been misinformed. There were a lot of German immigrants, relatively — they made up 8.6% of America’s white population in 1790 — but all Congress ever considered was printing laws in both languages for ease of comprehension.

In the end, Congress decided against that proposal, an early instance of our government’s neglect of minority language groups. Little digs up further examples that we may have been vaguely aware of but haven’t fully faced, most notably the effort to suppress Native American languages, which continued well into the 20th century. Native children were required to attend government boarding schools, where they were given new names and those caught “speaking Indian” would be slapped or beaten; families that refused to give up their children might be denied rations or sent off to Alcatraz.

Not all minority language groups were subjected to this level of coercion, of course, but most have suffered from a lasting stigma. When Little visits the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina, she finds it next to impossible to catch a few words of Gullah, the centuries-old creole language formed from a mix of English and several African languages brought over by slaves. It’s not that no one speaks Gullah; the language still has close to 10,000 monolingual speakers, and Gullah culture is highly visible on some of the islands. But many speakers still feel a deep sense of shame about the language, which used to be considered nothing more than “bad English.” As an example, Little quotes U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, whose family spoke Gullah: when asked in a question-and-answer session about his notorious silence on the bench, he explained that in high school he’d been mocked for “speaking a kind of dialect,” and as a result had kept quiet and “started developing the habit of listening.”

Even today there are many who think of stigmatizing and discouraging minority languages as, at worst, a necessary evil; after all, the ability to speak English is of incalculable benefit to anyone living in America, so why not encourage learning it as much as possible? Little addresses this viewpoint, as espoused by the official-English movement, in her chapter on Spanish. After reviewing statistics on language assimilation and the benefits of bilingualism, as well as the politics of English-only legislation, she concludes that immigrants already have plenty of incentives to learn English, and denying them bilingual government services and public school educations is likely to harm rather than help them.

Despite the book’s attention to past injustices, this isn’t a gloomy or an angry work. Like all true road trips, Little’s included surprising spectacles, chance encounters, and kitschy local attractions, many of which she records in entertaining detail. At times the adventure can feel a bit formulaic: “what you find must be more than you’re expecting to find” may be a rule of life, but it’s an even stronger rule of narrative.  Nevertheless, by time we reach the epilogue it’s clear that the process of writing the book opened Little’s eyes to the struggles of minority language groups and to the privileges she’s enjoyed as a native English speaker. Reading Trip of the Tongue, we get a taste of the same realization.

Sam Feldman is a freelance journalist based in Washington, D.C., and Brooklyn, N.Y. He holds a B.A. in linguistics from the University of Chicago and co-edits the Hypocrite Reader, an online monthly magazine.