In the Old Testament, God punished the builders of Babel by visiting on them a host of mutually unintelligible tongues. The truth, warns anthropologist Hugh Brody , was the exact contrary: in Eden, hunter-gatherers spoke thousands of languages until farmers took over. Within a century, up to 90 per cent of those languages could disappear. Canvassing field workers and indigenous voices from Siberia and Alaska to Australia and the Kalahari, he asks if we should let Babel die.