When I was a child, I read my way through the Golden Book Encyclopedia. In the volume for E I became entranced by the entry on Esperanto, a language created in the late nineteenth century to be a universal language that could be shared by speakers all over the world. How wonderful it would be, I thought, if everyone in the world could speak the same language! I was wild to find a way that I could start learning Esperanto myself.

As the years went by, however, I began to appreciate the amazing diversity of the world’s languages; I no longer valued the search for one single language that everyone in the world could speak. When I learned that the earth’s treasury of languages was becoming increasingly endangered by the forces of globalization, I thought how I would have felt if I had known this as a child. Just as, decades ago, I had wanted to learn Esperanto to promote universal understanding, now I would have wanted to learn an endangered language to save it from utter extinction. This was the seed from which this book grew.

I began my research by reading Dying Words: Endangered Languages and What They Have to Tell Us by Nicholas Evans, who studies Australian Aboriginal languages at Australian National University. The website Lizard and Betsy first discover in their internet searching is loosely based on the website for the Endangered Languages Project: www.endangeredlanguages.com. This website lists (at the time of this writing) 166 endangered languages within the United States alone, all languages of First Americans threatened by centuries of conquest and deliberate efforts on the part of the U.S. government and other institutions to exterminate Indigenous cultures and especially Indigenous languages.

The language videos the girls listen to are inspired by the “Conversations in Guernésiais” videos available on You Tube: www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLucc9aUimz0mhgn5RvNIhOv3q3-L8Bj-A, although I did not follow the conversations in the videos exactly. The written resources the girls find are drawn from a variety of online sources. It is not easy to find good online sources for learning endangered languages, so I somewhat simplified the search Betsy and Lizard would have had to go through to find helpful language-learning tools for Guernésiais.

Statistics on the number of speakers for any language are impossible to compile with precision and change constantly. For Guernésiais, I saw numbers ranging from two hundred to three hundred remaining speakers and chose two hundred for simplicity. Most endangered languages—including Guernésiais—have variations in how they are represented in written form, so there may be no one correct answer for how to write down any words in Guernésiais, or how best to give a phonetic rendering of it.