Babel

Three-quarters of the world can speak the twenty languages discussed in Babel. But what makes them stand out amid our other six thousands tongues? And will English, with its 1.5 billion speakers, forever keep its slot at number one, or eventually fade away like Latin?

Gaston Dorren delves deep into the extraordinary stories of these diverse lingua francas, tracing their politics origins, and their sometimes bloody rise to greatness. He deciphers their bewildering array of scripts, presents the gems and gaps in their vocabularies and charts their coinages and loans. He even explains how their grammars order their speakers' worldview.

Combining linguistics and cultural history, Babel takes us on an intriguing tour of the world, addressing such questions as how tiny Portugal spawned a major world language and Holland didn't; why Japanese women talk differently from men; and how non-alphabetic scripts, such as those of India and China, do the same job as our twenty-six letters. Not to mention the conundrums of why Vietnamese has four forms for 'I', how Tamil pronouns keep humans and deities apart, and why we all know more Korean and Arabic than we imagine.

Babel will change the way you look at the world and how we all speak.