In today's increasingly globalized world, one might be forgiven for wondering if one day the world's 5000 or so different languages will be reduced to just one, as seen sometimes in science fiction novels. And if so, English with its status as the undisputed lingua franca of the Internet and communication technology seems like an obvious candidate.
It may happen and it may not, but history suggests more likely not; world history is full of once-widely spread languages reduced after a few centuries to a handful of speakers, or none. At the same time, some very modest languages have survived with remarkably few changes for much longer than anyone could've predicted.
In this book, the author claims (perhaps a little arrogantly) to be the first to study systematically on a global level why some languages endure and others do not; he aims to go beyond the specific historic circumstances of any specific language, in an attempt to identify general determining factors.
In today's English-dominated world, nobody really stops to think why English is so widely spoken among Indians, while few if any Indonesians have any fluency in Dutch; but as Ostler shows, it could just as easily have been the other way around. In Latin-America, Spanish and Portuguese have almost completely supplanted all native languages, including those of the glorious Aztec and Inca Empires - except in little Paraguay, where virtually all of the population remains fluent in the modest Native American language Guarani. Among the three Northwest Semitic "sisters" - Aramaic, Phoenician and Hebrew - the two that once dominated the Middle East and the Mediterranean respectively have died or all but died, while the more modest Hebrew lives on (or at least resurrected itself) more than two thousand years later. Besides pure coincidence, are there factors that could explain those and countless other cases of widely spread languages that vanish entirely in a generation, and modest ones that survive against all odds?
I'm not sure I'm convinced that he really succeeds in answering this question, but the book is fascinating regardless, even if it's just a succession of histories of a good number of historically important languages (Sumerian, Akkadian, Egyptian, Aramaic, Chinese, Greek, Phoenician, Latin, Sanskrit, Arabic, Nahuatl, Quechua, Spanish, French, English and Russian are the main ones). Each chapter contains a number of long or short quotes in the languages discussed along with a translation and if necessary transcription, which by itself is already a pretty good reason to buy the book, for those among us who have a slight or not-so slight obsession with learning languages (you know who you are).
As you might expect from a book with goals as ambitious as this one, there are omissions, mistakes or dubious generalizations to be found in some chapters - it's impossible to be an expert on all these languages at the same time. Still, on the whole it's an impressive and fascinating work, particularly for language lovers. But even for monolingual readers who are willing to put some effort into it, it can be a fascinating book not only for its history lessons, but also for the broad overview of how radically different languages can be, and how they can affect the way one views the world.
