Who writes this?
This page should serve as one part bio, one part disclaimer.When I was in high school, I took French. I worked in a small bookstore where business was slow and leafed through the selections for German and Italian. Then, one day, I wondered what Arabic was like. This was before the web, so I wound up going through Baker and Taylor warehouse inventory updates and, gads!, the old Books In Print, and got Arabic books from Teach Yourself and Hippocrene. From here my language hobby started.
In college, I studied abroad at the Université de Haute Bretagne for one semester and wound up majoring in French. From there, I took a masters in French language, literature and culture and started (but did not finish) a doctorate. While I focused on French, I was always visiting bookstores and surfing the net in search of information about other languages, though mostly European languages.
In 2002, I moved to the Silicon Valley and started a website, The Language Pages. At about the same time, the local Barnes and Noble began stocking Hippocrene phrasebooks for strange and curious languages like Dari, Pashto and Uzbek. For some reason, Uzbek caught my attention. It was one of the first exotic languages I addressed on The Language Pages.
Curious about Uzbek, I searched the web for more information. There wasn’t much. I was particularly distressed when after a few months my own Uzbek articles on The Language Pages started showing up in my google searches. One thing I did find was registan.net, which included links to music videos. I was intrigued both by the colorful traditional dress in some videos and by the thoroughly modern look of others. Clearly there was more to Central Asia than the nomadic cultures romanticized here, there and elsewhere. That led to a problem: What were they singing about in those videos?
In recent years, I have created multilingua.info, including sections on the Turkic and Iranian languages. In the mean time, my interest in the music, languages and culture have grown, along with my frustration that there aren’t a lot of good road maps to finding out more. Hence this site.
Today I work for a language organization (with which this site is not affiliated). And I continue to explore languages. I am generally familiar with the language products that I mention here, having used them for at least one language (eg, I've done Pimsleur Spanish I & II and Pimsleur Turkish Conversational). I'll claim some knowledge about them. However, it will be noted that there is nothing in here about my treks through Afghanistan, my visits to Bukhara or my time among nomadic herders in Tajikistan. These haven’t happened. The closest I’ve come to Central Asia, in person, is the seashore in San Francisco. This is an effort by a Westerner interested in Central Asia to share what he has found. So if you have been to Central Asia and found a certain guidebook to be unreliable, or another to be exceptionally good, please, please do leave a note in the comments. If you know of a website that is useful, leave that too. And if you haven't, be aware that I'm offering the best information I have, not firsthand experience.
Geoffrey Barto
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