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A thought-provoking and disquieting book. Ghil'ad Zuckermann is a linguist who originally comes from Israel, where he made a deep study of Israeli Hebrew. For some time now, he has been living in Adelaide. Here, a large part of his work is concerned with a program that is trying to revive the Australian aboriginal language Barngarla, which had not been spoken since the 1960s. In Revivalistics, he puts his accumulated experience together and asks some searching questions. What does it mean to "revive a language"? Is it even possible? If it is possible, how should you do it? Why would we want to do it? What are we likely to achieve? The answers are interesting and paradoxical.

In the first part, which accounts for about two-thirds of the text, Ghil'ad puts Israeli Hebrew under the microscope. When I started I had no Hebrew at all, and the first couple of chapters were slow as I painfully got up to speed with the alphabet - it's all about the details, and every page has dozens of Hebrew words on it. But the details are there to serve a clear purpose. The official line is that Israeli Hebrew is the direct descendent of the language spoken two and a half thousand years ago: this is sometimes dramatised by saying that if the Prophet Isaiah were to come back today, people would with a little effort be able to understand him. A bold claim, and Ghil'ad goes to great lengths to show just how shaky it is. Officially, Israeli Hebrew's one and only parent is classical Hebrew. But in actual fact, a large part of the language seems to have come from the many languages spoken by the people who created Modern Hebrew.

The most important of these languages is Yiddish. A good proportion of the Jews of the Diaspora spoke Yiddish as their everyday language, treating Hebrew as a sacred tongue. If this is what they were used to speaking, it is hardly strange that it rubbed off on their creation. Ghil'ad argues that, while the words of Israeli Hebrew are mostly Hebrew, the sounds are much more like those of Yiddish. And when you look more closely at the words, it's not so clear there either. The meanings are often very different from the original ones, and can have very different associations: so for example תוֹרָה (torah) traditionally means the body of sacred knowledge handed down from God, but in Israeli Hebrew has been extended to mean "theory". עָמָל (����á��) is traditionally a negative word which can mean "toil" and sometimes "mischief"; the socialists who started the kibbutzim turned it into a positive word which means "work".

Ghil'ad has hundreds more things like this, documenting the often surreptious influence of Yiddish, Arabic, Russian, Polish and other languages on Israeli Hebrew. (He is comfortable with an impressive number of languages). His overall conclusion is that the official story of Hebrew's miraculous revival is full of holes. Although this was the unquestionably the most successful language revival project of all time, Israeli Hebrew is not truly the successor to the language spoken in the sixth century BCE. It borrows a good deal from that language; but it doesn't have the same sounds, it doesn't have the same grammar, and it doesn't have the same soul. Ghil'ad makes no apology for using this term. Everyone who works with language knows that a language has a soul. Maybe you can't measure it, but it's there.

So if you aren't really reviving the original language, is this a worthwhile thing to be doing? And here's the paradox: Ghil'ad says the answer is yes, yes, a thousand times yes. Even if you can't really get back what you lost, an imperfect, partial solution is so much better than nothing. This becomes increasingly clear in the second part of the book, which is about Australian aboriginal languages and Ghil'ad's program of attempting to revive Barngarla. It's the other end of the spectrum from Hebrew. There is very little written data available after the Australian colonists killed the Barngarla culture and stopped children from learning their own language. There is no big, well-funded team of expert linguists working on the problem, just a few enthusiasts on shoestring budgets. But this is vitally important. The statistics presented on mental illness, suicide and substance abuse in Australian aboriginal populations are horrifying. These are people who in many cases feel they have nothing left, who have no reason to carry on living. But studies show that if they learn to recover even a bit of their ancestral language, they start to feel better. It's not possible to give back to the original Australians what was taken from them. But that is no excuse. If we can't help them get back their whole language, we should see if an imperfect reconstruction is possible. We are obliged to do the best job we can.

I feel personally involved here. We may be able to use , the language learning platform we've been developing over the last couple of years, to help Ghil'ad and other language revivalists. We've done a couple of preliminary exercises: we made a LARA version of that Ghil'ad published last year, and a LARA version of . It's a start. But so far it's not useful in practice; in particular, it needs to be made available on mobile devices, a piece of functionality that Ghil'ad has asked for several times and which we so far haven't got around to. I read this book and I feel bad about our slackness. We need to raise our game.