Empires of the Word: A Language History of the WorldIf the history of languages has taught us anything, Nicholas Ostler argues, it is that no language - however populous its speakers, confident its culture and advanced its technology - has remained the linga franca indefinitely. As the technological and cultural dominance of America has consolidated the territorial achievements of the British Empire, the English language (aided by the predominantly Anglophone Internet) has apparently never had it so good. And yet the long-term dominance of English will inevitably, in due course, give way. Will English be displaced in world terms by a language such as Mandarin Chinese, which has been a great regional player since well before English emerged as an offshoot of Anglo-Saxon, French and Norse? |
Contents
THE NATURE OF LANGUAGE HISTORY | 5 |
An inward history | 13 |
LANGUAGES BY LAND | 27 |
Egyptian and Chinese | 113 |
Whys and wherefores | 149 |
Foreign relations | 158 |
Chinese unsettled | 167 |
The Cultured Career of Sanskrit | 174 |
Sanskrit no longer alone | 222 |
Celt Roman German and Slav | 272 |
The First Death of Latin | 315 |
LANGUAGES BY SEA | 323 |
Spanish in the New World | 331 |
Europes Languages Abroad | 380 |
Microcosm or Distorting Mirror? The Career of English | 456 |
LANGUAGES TODAY AND TOMORROW | 523 |
Outsiders views | 190 |
Sanskrit in SouthEast Asia | 199 |
Central and eastern Asia | 207 |
The charm of Sanskrit | 214 |
NOTES | 561 |
BIBLIOGRAPHY | 579 |
INDEX | 591 |
Copyright | |