of deriving some kind of scientific rules going beyond the individual historical circumstances of each case - or if he does, some of them are blindingly obvious, like the role of religion in promulgating Arabic and Hebrew. But eh, I didn't really mind if the general conclusions weren't too strong, as there was enough fascinating stuff in the individual case studies to make the book interesting regardless.

Hm. I follow you to some extent in that argument when it comes to historical events in which one or a few people play a deciding role - after the old kind of history that loved its hero worship, the new kind has gone too far in the other direction to the point of almost pretending that the choices of the key individuals in question are irrelevant.

But in the case of language history, it's all about people making choices in the aggregate as you say, so surely those trends and forces are crucial for that?

Sure, but how does a language rise to that lingua franca status? Some do it the obvious way - conquering large parts of the globe. But there are others that managed it in much stranger ways, like how Aramaic somehow managed to become the lingua france of the Assyrian Empire even though the original speakers of Aramaic never amounted to very much.

You're looking at it from a modern perspective and taking the current status for granted, though. For an Indian and an Indonesian now, it's glaringly obvious why the first will want to learn English and the second won't want to learn Dutch. But go back to when those countries were first colonized. In the seventeenth century, Britain was only starting to outpace the Netherlands as a world power, and English had nothing like the status it has now - and indeed, at that time and a for a good while afterwards, neither nation was really interested in teaching their language to the natives in their colony, much preferring that the natives stay far away from all European languages in which they might gain dangerous knowledge. Later on, though, the Britons started teaching English on a wide scale and using it increasingly in government - while the Dutch, for a long time, used Malay and even Portuguese to communicate with the natives rather than Dutch. Those are choices that were made, with repercussions lasting to this day - if the Dutch had made different choices, Dutch might've remained a lingua franca in Indonesia in the same way that (to skip English for a moment) Portuguese is in Mozambique or Angola, or French in much of Africa.

Ostler does suggest that in a few specific cases, the most obvious explanation for a language's success is some inherent property - or a property that the language's speakers widely saw it as having. One of those cases is Aramaic, which had a major advantage over Akkadian in the form of its alphabet (as opposed to the originally Sumerian cuneiform that Akkadian was still using). Another is Sanskrit, whose speakers somehow managed to convince themselves and much of the rest of Asia that Sanskrit was somehow a supremely beautiful and prestigious language, regardless of who did or didn't speak it.

The other way around might be an exaggeration in the sense that English is so dominant nowadays that the inhabitants of every country, including Indonesia, have good reasons to learn it. But you get the basic point - if the Dutch had used their own language for everything and promoted it, while the English had continued their original policy of promoting Persian and Hindustani over English in India, then today's Indians might not speak English much better than the Indonesians.

True enough.

Hebrew is an interesting case because it was a dead language for most purposes for so long - it's a bit like if someone managed to start a whole community of people speaking Latin as a living language again. Only possible because their respective religions keep/kept them from being entirely and completely dead.

Not to nitpick, but Romania barely has any Slavic population. Even among the minorities, most are either Hungarian, German or Romany/Gypsy.

Anyway, you're absolutely right to mention that example of those Germans in Romania, that's just the type of cases the writer is interested in. Most of those populations had moved there in the late Middle Ages, never amounting to more than a minority (Silesia, Sudetenland, Königsberg etc. are obviously a different story), and somehow kept speaking German for five hundred or so years - starting long before German could make any kind of claim to superior scientific or cultural supremacy. An interesting contrast with the Germanic tribes of the early Middle Ages, like the Visigoths or Vandals, which ruled supreme in Spain and North-Africa respectively, but nevertheless very rapidly lost their native Germanic languages.

I'll keep an eye out for that, thanks!