In Praise of the Garrulous

Allan Cameron, who has lived in Nigeria, Bangladesh and Italy, and worked in various fields, now lives on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland, where he writes, translates and runs his own publishing company Vagabond Voices, which is principally concerned with the translation and publication of European novels in English. His novels, The Golden Menagerie (a modern verions of Apuleius's Golden Ass) and The Berlusconi Bonus (a political satire directed against the Neo-Cons and the ideas of Francis Fukuyama), were both published by Luath Press.

Introduction 1. Silence, like gold, is the currency of the powerful (an examination of the relationship between language and power) 2. The birth of language (the origins and language as means to story knowledge) 3. Words are a gift from the dead (language is the product of historical happenchance and the cumulative efforts of individuals over generations) 4. The creation of the social mind (the "social mind", a key concept in the author's argument) 5. Big is not beautiful, but merely more profitable (minority languages do the same things as dominant one, but the economies of scale are driving them into extinction) 6. Register (a neglected subject: the disappearance of register over the last thirty years) 7. The need for a lingua franca and its inherent dangers (powerful international languages are necessary lingua frances, but they are a danger to cultural diversity and themselves) 8. Conclusion