As long as I can remember I have been fascinated by languages, both natural and artificial. The book Biting The Wax Tadpole: Confessions of a Language Fanatic, by Elizabeth Little, was written by a young lady with a similar interest. It’s a little full of oddities for the sake of oddities, but it does a good job of expressing the fascination and delights of languages. I recommend it to anyone. If it piques your interest, and you want to learn more, check out The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language, by John McWhorter. He also did a good lecture series for The Teaching Company, Story of Human Language

One thing bothers me about these books. The love of language leads the authors to a conservationist’s view of rare languages. Odd tribal languages must be preserved at all costs, and the only way to do that is to teach them to the children and insist that they use them. To me, this is converting the tribe into a museum exhibit, and deliberately making it more difficult for them to communicate with the world at large. Elders may support this as a way to keep the children down on the farm, but I doubt that the children would agree. Given the choice, I suspect that most of the children would choose a more common and widely used language. To be fair, this attitude is not as strong in Little’s book as in McWhorter’s, and I may be making false assumptions about her attitude.