The full text of my recent Science piece can be found here. It begins like this:

After a long day in the field, deep in the mountains of southwestern China near the border with Vietnam, retired environmental health professor Gary Shook was surprised to meet another American, Jamin Pelkey, staying in the same government guesthouse. The two exchanged pleasantries.

"I'm collecting tiger beetles," explained Shook, who had found four new species in the region. "What about you?"

"I'm collecting new species of languages," replied Pelkey, then a graduate student at La Trobe University in Australia doing fieldwork for his dissertation...

Senator Daniel Akaka of Hawaii announced that he's sponsoring the National Language Coordination Act of 2009, which he also sponsored in 2005. The bill would create a cabinet-level language czar to "oversee, coordinate, and implement continuing national security and language education initiatives." Sounds great, but if the czar has no budget control, it probably won't work. As I wrote for the New Republic (the original TNR link is dead),

Akaka's bill gives the czar a budget for p.r. but no oversight over anyone else's budget, so the czar wouldn't set goals and steer a national language strategy to meet them as much as hope for the cooperation of the agencies represented on the council. Akaka's bill doesn't specify to whom the czar would report, either, which leaves no one responsible when the goals aren't met.

I'm taking some time to write about a language learner I admire: Michael Langell, my uncle, who died on Wednesday at the age of 70. He was a Glenmary missionary -- Glenmary is a Catholic group that builds Catholic communities mainly in the Protestant-dominated American South. He worked in Tennessee and North Carolina, and in the 1990s his congregations swelled with Spanish speakers from Mexico and Central America. Rather than throw up his hands, he started learning Spanish. He was well into his 50s by that point, but went to immersion programs in Cuernevaca, Mexico and continued taking college-level classes in the US. In his parish, he worked on the homily with a native Spanish speaker, who delivered the homily. A lifelong priest (though as a young man he was a great ball player recruited by the Detroit Tigers), he was a humble guy, so never made great claims for his Spanish, and probably traded homily duties because he wanted a native speaker to give important messages. But he was more effective in the language than he let on, and that was the point: he wanted to be effective, and he did what he had to do to care for people the right way, which was to speak their language. Resto en paz, señor, tio mio.

It hasn't been a year for much journalism by me, but I do have a piece in the April 17th Science about efforts to identify and survey languages in China (in Yunnan province, specifically), and about the politics involved. In China, as elsewhere, what gets called "a language" (as opposed to "a dialect" or "a speech variety") is an ethnobureaucratic artifact more than a reflection of reality -- though in the Chinese case you see the clash between ethnobureaucracies, with the Chinese government on one side and a global international standard on the other. What makes this case intriguing is that the global regime, along with a definition of "language" that Chinese scholars don't support, is aided by SIL International, not the sort of organization that could have done work in China not long ago.

I'll put up a PDF of the article in 30 days.

Last week I appeared with Ammon Shea at Real Art Ways in Hartford, Connecticut, reading and talking about books. (He talked about his, me mine. Maybe next time we can swap.) His is a word book: he spent a year reading the Oxford English Dictionary. But it's not a word book like a lexicographer would do, it's a delightful book about the experience of reading a book that's a list of words (and he's working on another book about reading books that we don't think of as books: phone books, catalogs, etc.).

Anyway, I had a blast, and here are two photos:

Until my time at the Dobie Paisano ranch, I'd never worked on such a large surface. This table, built by Texas author & journalist A.C. Greene, not only inspired order, it enabled memory. Files in drawers and books on shelves I tend to forget about, so it's as elemental as having my materials in front of my eyes. Not as distracting as I thought they'd be were windows opening onto the porch and front yard through which I saw deer, turkey, armadillo, cardinals, hummingbirds, and roadrunners.

And I'll never write there again. The fellowship is over, and we moved out yesterday. The rest of the book I'll be writing on a 4-foot long table in a windowless laundry room in Portland, Maine -- where I am productive, and which I do like. But I leave this with this book, Babel No More, about half drafted, so it's hard not to see some connection.

Through two locked gates, two miles down a gravel road, over the creek (dry, dry, dry) and up a little hill is a house with a room where I work. It looks like this:

I once accidentally left the manuscript of Um... on the porch overnight. In the morning it looked like this: