Easily one of the most intensely researched popular science books I've ever read (it's right up there with Jared Diamond's works in terms of endless footnotes and works cited), this is an impressively sweeping overview of the history of a dozen of the world's major languages and language families that manages to be interesting even when he's talking about stuff like the developmental similarities between Chinese and ancient Egyptian, or how people decided to use ancient languages like Akkadian and Sanskrit as lingua francas, or why Dutch didn't catch on as a colonial language. I personally find language history and usage fascinating (nerd alert), so maybe not everyone will find this book as cool as I did, but this was one of those books where I learned something new on basically every page and enjoyed doing it. Ostler's ability to synthesize vast amounts of research is awe-inspiring, and his obvious love for certain languages (he has a real crush on Sanskrit, in particular) carries over to the subject material in ways that only the best authors manage. He has some really interesting insights on all sorts of things, like why Germanic tribes managed to conquer half the Roman Empire but didn't impose their languages anywhere whereas the Arab conquests only a few hundred years later led to permanent linguistic change across almost all of their territories, and his ending discussion of the evolution and future of English is probably worth the price of the book right there. ( )

An interesting linguistic history of some of the world's biggest languages — why they rose, why some of them fell, and why they didn't experience other paths. Full of interesting tidbits, such as the surprising persistence of indigenous languages in the Spanish North American colonies we think of as monolithically Spanish-language today, or the question of why some languages (English, Mandarin, French) spread while others (German, Russian) don't even when speakers of those languages exert political and military control. (Speakers of Germanic languages overran the entire western Roman Empire; in no place but Britain did a Germanic language take outside of Germania.)

Only at the very end of the book does Ostler step back from his survey of major languages to try to draw systematic lessons about why some languages succeed and others don't. It was interesting and tantalizingly brief, and I wanted to know more. ( )

I bought this thinking it would be philological in nature, but it turned out to be something else entirely; a history of the spread (and decline in many cases) of the use of major languages throughout history. Traditional philology gets only fleeting mentions. If the author is to be believed, such a thing has never been attempted before.

Hence I was less interested than I had hoped, but that isn't the fault of the author - and I wasn't totally uninterested, either. Parts of the book, mainly those overlapping with pre-existing interests of mine, were fascinating, other parts were a bit of a grind. The basic idea of examining how conventional historical processes (e.g. military, colonial, mercantile, migrational, religious, technological) impact the use, spread and decline of languages did seem interesting and original, particularly the generalising conclusions but, oddly, they come before the detailed exposition they are derived from.

Strongly recommended to history buffs - not so much to anybody else.
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Fascinating look at languages through history which spread because other people wanted or had to learn them such as Chinese, Aramaic, Sanskrit, Greek, and Spanish. After looking at why different languages persisted in being spoken by a large number of people over a wide area, the author tries to predict whether English is here to stay as the current no. 1 international language. ( )

Oh dear--I had such high hopes--and I really do love the occasional academic treatise. This just wasn't compelling, despite in the abstract sounding like a slam dunk for me. Eventually I realised one day I will die, and I'd rather have read something else. It's really, really specific, technical, and historical, and despite all the drama and romance that the subject could have had, it was about as gripping as reading about how General Motors occasionally changed their car designs, and how. No, not even car designs, less interesting, um, let's say how they changed their engine. That sort of thing. I think there's a nice opportunity for somebody to write a 250 pager on the same topic, but with more general appeal. ( )

Quite enlightening; full of interesting insights – although now and then something’s a little suspect. Author Nicholas Ostler claims a working knowledge of 26 languages, and shows them off in Empires of the Word. This is a history of the world’s major languages and their evolution over time. Ostler starts with the Semitic languages – Akkadian, Phoenician, Aramaic, Arabic; then continues in roughly the historical order of when the language became important on the world scene: Egyptian, Chinese, Sanskrit, Greek, Celtic, Latin, German, Slavic. In the second half, Ostler goes on to trace the spread of languages once navigation made intercontinental travel practical; Spanish and Portuguese, Dutch, French, Russian and English; and in a conclusion Ostler speculates on the future of these languages.

Among the interesting insights: Sumerian is the first written language, is ideographic (like Chinese), and isn’t related to any other as far as anybody can tell. However, the people who conquered Sumer recognized the value of writing and adapted it to their own language, Akkadian, by taking the sound values of Sumerian ideograms and using them to represent syllables in Akkadian. Other languages of the Middle East – Elamite, Hurrian, Urartian, Hittite – used the same method (Hittite is interesting because while the others are Semitic it belongs to the Indo-European language family, and was originally written ideographically with hieroglyphs but adopted cuneiform). This method seems extremely clumsy, but it was made to work for millennia, and Ostler assigns it importance equivalent to the printing press in world language technology.


The Phoenicians made the next step, the alphabet, probably facilitated by the fact that papyrus was more convenient for business than clay. Phoenician was once in use from the Black Sea to Cornwall, but (with the salient exception of Carthage) the Phoenicians just maintained trading stations and never established colonies; thus their language disappeared with them. Punic, the language of Carthage, lasted longer; St. Augustine mentions there were still Punic speakers in North Africa in the fifth century AD. Ostler notes that a language very closely related to Phoenician, Hebrew, is “back from the dead”; like some other religious languages (Ge’ez, Coptic, Old Church Slavonic) it was confined to religious use for millennia (Jesus almost certainly knew Hebrew but the everyday language of the Middle East in His time was Aramaic; in fact some of the more recent parts of the Old Testament – parts of Daniel, for example – were written in Aramaic, not Hebrew). But Hebrew is once again in use in Israel, after a more than 2000-year hiatus.


Ostler compares Egyptian and Chinese – this is one of the places where he isn’t very successful. He tries to draw an analogy between the country’s languages and their geopolitical situation, with both being repeatedly invaded by outside powers who then adopted Chinese or Egyptian in place of whatever their own language was. This seems to be true for China, but doesn’t work for Egypt; Egyptian had been written in hieroglyphs for more than 1000 years before the country had a foreign invasion – it’s much more defensible than China. It’s true that near the end of its history as an independent state Egypt was invaded by Nubians, Assyrians, Persians and Macedonians – and it was Macedonian Greek that finally replaced the native language, to be replaced in turn by Arabic. Ostler claims Coptic, still the liturgical language of the Egyptian Orthodox Church, is still “Egyptian” and thus the language is still in use, sort of; Coptic has long since dropped hieroglyphs in favor of an alphabet based on Greek (with a couple of extra letters to accommodate sounds not used in Greek). Perhaps; there are other examples of languages where the orthographic system changed – I already mentioned Hittite, and there’s Linear B (and maybe Linear A) for Greek.


Chinese has been stable for a remarkably long time, despite the apparent difficulty in using an ideographic language. Ostler notes a salient advantage that I hadn’t really appreciated; Chinese spoken language variants, such as Wu and Yue (“Shanghainese” and “Cantonese”) are unintelligible to a Mandarin speaker – but everybody can read the characters. Ostler notes that Mandarin will be the most common language in the world for a long time into the future, unless something really disastrous happens.


Among the Phoenician’s accomplishments was teaching the alphabet to Greeks (who, in turn, taught it to Etruscans and thence to Romans and thence to us). Greek illustrates one of Ostler’s recurring themes – the rise and fall of “administrative” languages. Greek settlers colonized “Magna Graecia”, establishing cities in Spain, France, Sicily, Italy, Africa, and the Black Sea littoral. Then Alexander spread Greek to Anatolia, the Levant, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Iran, Afghanistan, and India. After Alexander’s empire collapsed, Greek remained the language of the Eastern Roman Empire (which eventually was all the Roman Empire there was) and hung on there until 1453. In many of these places, Greek remained a language of the elite – the Parthian kings of Iran inscribed their coins in Greek long after they had replaced the Seleucids. And, Ostler (who holds a degree in Classics from Oxford in addition to a PhD in Linguistics from MIT) notes, it remained that way well into the 20th century, when every well-educated person in the West was expected to know Latin and Greek. Actual native speakers of Greek are now confined to Greece proper, Macedonia, and a few small villages in extreme southern Italy that are the last remnants of Magna Graecia.


This segues into another puzzle – why did Latin quickly replace native languages in Gaul, Spain, and even Romania (which was only occupied briefly by Rome)? Ostler has a couple of suggestions – Rome planted a lot of legionary veterans as colonists, and the local Celtic speakers saw Latin as the language of economic success – rather like English today. That, in turn, requires an explanation of why Latin was replaced again by local languages, and Ostler’s explanation for this is the collapse of literacy after the end of the Western Roman Empire. Each community began to adopt its own pronunciation and grammar. Ostler suggests that literate people – who would have been almost entirely churchmen – would read out Latin texts but with local pronunciation. We call the language groups replacing Latin the Romance languages; it turns out that was once an actual name; in 842 Ludwig the German and Charles the Bald signed a treaty known as the Strasburg Oath, written in Latin, Old High German, and “Romance”, and the church councils of Tours (813) and Mainz (847) instructed priests to write out homilies in “Romance” so the common people could understand them (presumably when read aloud; it’s unlikely the “common people” of the time were literate in any language).


Continuing on this theme, Ostler speculates on why the barbarian conquests of the Roman Empire produced so little lasting language effect – except in one case. Germanic speaking peoples – Vandals, Goths, Angles, Jutes, Saxons and Franks (the word “France” derives from a people who spoke German) – overran the empire from the Rhine to North Africa but didn’t make any change in language – except in Iceland, where there was no competition, and England. Ostler speculates the final determinant in the English language was the Black Death in the 14th century. Up until then, the locals probably spoke British (Celtic) or English (Germanic) depending on where they lived, but the nobility spoke Norman French. If the historical pattern had held, one would expect some variant of French to gradually become the national language. Instead, Oestler theorizes, the plague disrupted English social stratification such that it was no longer necessary to know French to hold a prestige – even if not necessarily noble – position. (He makes an interesting – if not necessarily convincing – economic argument here; if the population of a country is cut in half, as England’s was by the Black Death, everybody’s net worth doubles). By 1362 court pleas could be entered in English rather than French (although still recorded in Latin); in 1381 Richard II was able to give a convincing speech in English to the rebels during the Peasant’s Revolt; and in 1399 Henry IV was the first English king to give his coronation address in English. (It might not be easily understood by a modern English speaker – try reading the Canterbury Tales in the original language some time – but it was probably good enough contemporaries).


That brings us to Oestler’s predictions for the future. As already noted, Mandarin will continue to be the most common language well into the future – it’s spoken by twice as many people as the runner-up, English. All the European languages, with the exception of Spanish, will decline – and Spanish will only increase outside of Europe. Oestler seems pessimistic about the future of English, noting that other “prestige” languages – Aramaic, Greek, Latin – have dropped off the charts. He concedes that English is still the language of science, but seems pessimistic here as well, claiming that scientific research will decline as it is no longer supported by the majority. I hope he’s wrong here. One thing he doesn’t discuss at all is machine translation; by 2050 (say) it will probably be possibly for someone literate only in English to have a perfectly mutually intelligible online conversation with someone literate only in Malayan.


One surprise is Arabic doesn’t make Oestler’s list of the top 20 world languages; there are, after all, over a billion Muslims in the world and every one of them is supposed to be able to read, or at least recite, verses from the Quran. I suspect Oestler may be trying to tiptoe around a political correctness minefield here; although good Muslims are supposed to know Arabic a lot of them only have rote-memorized things that they don’t understand.


I was also surprised to find that Malayan – the national language of Indonesia – is actually the native language of only a small fraction of the population (the majority language is Javanese). Malayan was adopted by the Dutch when they colonized Indonesia as a trade and servant language. There’s a similar situation in Pakistan with Urdu; it was originally an “army” language (the word “Urdu” is related to the word “horde”) intended to provide a common language for sepoys serving in the Indian army (Urdu and Hindi are essentially the same language and are mutually intelligible; however Urdu is written with Arabic script and Hindi is written with Devanagari). Swahili is in the same category; although it’s the national language of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, and Tanzania, it’s not the native language of anybody; instead it’s a “trade language” derived from Bantu and Arabic.


Good maps show language development. Extensive quotes, in the original script, transliteration, and translation to English (I note Oestler’s Egyptian orthography and transliterations, while technically correct, do not follow standard “Egyptologese” practice). Extensive bibliography. Enjoyable, instructive and recommended. ( )

History is a lot more fascinating when viewed through the spread of various languages and cultures.

The author here presents his case for the importance of languages in the human history. The distinctive traits of various languages and how they are central to the formation of societies and their role in defining their cultures.

After a brief introduction on the nature of language history, the first half of the book deals with the language spread by land. Starting with the mesopotamian languages of Sumerian, Akkadian, Aramaic and Arabic. It then goes on to the rise and fall of sanskrit in India, of latin and Greek in Europe and the spread of Chinese and Egyptian.

Sevond half of the book deals with the spread of the European languages by the sea, starting with Portuguese, spanish, dutch,French and then English.

The final section deals with the current state of the most spoken languages in the world and some speculation regarding their future.

This is a richly detailed work that goes through the rise and fall of more than a dozen of the world's most influential languages while investigating the factors involved in their growth and death.

Filled with a lot of anecdotes in their original languages and some detailed descriptions of the structures of various languages, this is not an easy and fast read but is very fascinating and enjoyable. ( )

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2778599.html

This fascinating book looks at the history of those languages which have become dominant for a while in areas far from their origins - Sumerian, Akkadian, Phoenician, Aramaic, Arabic, Egyptian, Chinese, Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Nahuatl, Quechua, Portuguese, Dutch, French, Russian, and English (plus a few others of course) - and asks how this process happens, and also how such languages get displaced by their successors.

He starts with the Middle East, and I probably learned more from this section than from any other. I would have found it difficult to distinguish between the Akkadians, the Assyrians and the Babylonians; now I appreciate the lovely continuity between Akkadian, Aramaic and Arabic, all fairly closely related and the lingua franca of Mesopotamia and far beyond for centuries. The Greek chapter also pulls apart the roles of the different Greek dialects in both literature and politics; again, information that I had been vaguely aware of but packaged here comprehensibly. And it had not occurred to me that Ancient Egyptian survived as Coptic until a few centuries ago.

I particularly appreciated was the account of the linguistic shifts of the Chinese languages. I've found it very difficult to get to grips with Chinese history in the past - the names mean nothing to me and I don't have a good sense of the geography; and I've sensed some writers steering away from the question of internal cultural or ethnic differences in China. Of course, if you approach it through the lens of language, it is impossible to ignore the cultural and ethnic aspects, and equipped with those tools I suddenly found a lot of what I had previous read fitting together much better in my mind. And it's important for understanding how our world will work in the future - Mandarin has about the same number of speakers as the second, third and fourth languages in the world combined (Spanish, English and Hindi/Urdu), and the other Chinese languages are level pegging with major European languages like French and Italian.

The linguistic approach also offers a somewhat different perspective on imperialism and colonisation. It's actually rather rare in historical terms for a language to jump tracks and become a widely spoken mother tongue in places far from its origin. Most of the ancient languages discussed were languages of commerce, religion and/or administration which took a very long time to percolate into the population as a whole; apart from settler colonies, the same is true in more modern times - Dutch is not spoken in Indonesia (and barely in the Caribbean); English may be the national language of India but it is spoken by only 10% of the population. It is relatively unusual for the colonisers' language to completely displace the previous incumbents. English has been lucky twice: when Germanic tribes conquered the Western Roman Empire, Britain was the only province where their language stuck, everywhere else either retaining Latin (or Basque, which had been around for even longer) or switching from Aramaic to Arabic when the time came. Surviving a narrow brush with Norman French, it then became the core language of European settlement in North America. In both cases, depopulation of the indigenous population by plague, helped by ethnic cleansing, appears to have been a crucial factor, as with Spanish in Latin America. (Simple conquest is not enough; cf German and Japanese.) Similarly, Portuguese has Brazil, but none of the other ex-colonies is really lusophone in the same way; as for French, there is no country apart from France where it has a majority of native speakers - not Belgium (38%), not even Monaco (45%).

But Ostler is very far from being an anglophone triumphalist, and takes his last chapter to look ahead at the eventual fall of English as a world language, and to speculate about what might replace it. One would have to bet on Chinese, already an official language or an unofficial language of commerce all round the South China Sea. He makes the point that Chinese, English and Malay/Indonesian have all been helped in their success by rather simple internal structures which make them relatively easier to learn to speak. Chinese, however, is hampered by its writing system which is much more difficult to grasp. I must say I can see English clinging on for centuries to come, as a lingua franca for humanity, even with a relatively decreasing share of native speakers.

Anyway, very much worth reading, full of detail and connections which I had not thought of before. ( )

Filled with details and trivia. Very interesting. ( )

If you, like me, are interested in linguistics and big-picture world history, this is the book. Looking at the history of world powers not in terms of political boundaries but of groups defined by common languages reveals a lot about where power truly lay and how different peoples identified themselves and influenced each other. ( )

I think this a superior production, and Mr. Ostler seems to know his business. There are even some hints about how a tongue can connive towards its own longevity. ( )

Seemingly exhaustive survey of the history of languages around the world. Written mostly for the expert. I, being only mildly interested in the topic, soon got bogged down. A more popular version of this book (without all the niggly detail) could have been written in 300 pages rather than 560! The parts I did understand, I enjoyed and will admit to skimming a lot of the rest, thankful that there was not a test at the end! ( )

Fascinating account of the development of world languages. The best overview I have found - detailed and knowledgeable without being dry. ( )

a world history through the major languages. Just my kind of tome: learned but written in a worn-lightly way. The languages come across almost like living people. The section on Greek is especially fascinating. Witty ironies here and there about what makes languages, cultures, powers survive or fade. Think Oswald Spengler or Arnold Toynbee if they'd tried to do standup at the Ed Fringe. ( )

An impressive and sweeping view of the history of languages throughout human history. It tackles some of the big questions: Why do some languages die out? Why do some flourish, like Chinese or English?

As it turns out, it's a really complex issue. The book starts with the earliest languages (Sumerian, Akkadian, etc.) and moves all the way up through the colonial and modern eras, and speculates on the rise and fall of our languages in the future.

This is dense, but fascinating stuff. ( )

This book takes a meta-meta-level analysis on "A History of World Languages" (which would have been a more accurate title), looking at languages that have dominated large swathes of the earth for the last 4000 years, and the reasons behind that dominance, be they political, economical, social or other. The author then tries to identify common features of the success and eventual decline of these languages, finally applying these factors to a forecast for the current dominance of English.
It is clear that the author is deeply knowledgeable on Akkadian, Sanskrit, Nahuatl and Latin, and inevitably some other languages (such as Russian, and the Germanic and Turkic languages) receive a more superficial treatment than they would deserve. The author moves onto noticeably thin ice when he moves out of his area of specialisation and speculates about current or future economic trends (eg concerning Asia), or when he postulates the demise of Russian as a lingua franca because the Central Asian republics speak mutually intelligible Turkic languages (thereby ignoring the fact that the mutually intelligible vocabulary denotes day-to-day matters, and that specialised vocabulary has been created later, from Arab, Persian or Russian sources or by creating neologisms. As a result, these republics predominantly still communicate in Russian with each other, and Russian as lingua franca is still very much alive and well). The author neatly summarises every chapter at its conclusion, which may give some readers an impression of being condescended to (but in any case is to be preferred to excessively hermetic texts or ramshackle trains of thought).
Otherwise, a well-written book and deeply researched that adds a much-needed high-level analysis to the "languages" bookshelf. A keeper, to be consulted again and again. ( )

One of the best books I've ever had the pleasure of reading. Engaging way to learn history - through the spread of language : even when the conquerors rule, sometimes their language does not. an ancient language may live on in official documents long after it has ceased being used in conversation. Author critiques our worship of "the classic" texts, and the conclusions we have based on them. Has he written a book on that topic alone? Would love to see that, too! ( )

I'm very interested in this subject but this book is dry. How about some prose and a couple of interesting asides? ( )

An ambitious survey of how different languages have come to thrive---or eventually die out---throughout world history. There's a lot of interesting information here, but the presentation is so dense and dry that I ended up skimming a lot of it. I'm interested in the subject, but not interested enough to want quite this much information. I was interested in the chapter on English and in parts of other chapters, and the book is organized in such a way that you can easily just read the parts that interest you.

Complete review on my blog. ( )

useful and informative ( )

Very enjoyable work of linguistic history (NOT historical linguistics) that looks at how and why some languages came to be used by millions of non-native speakers, while others remained firmly stuck in their own back yards. Impressively well researched with a heavy reliance on contemporary sources, very well written, and thought-provoking from both linguistic and historical perspectives. ( )

Ostler is at his best when writing about "classic" languages such as Sumerian, Sanskrit, Greek, or Chinese, and why they were influential. When he's writing about modern languages and their dissemination this book comes off more as a potted history of Western imperialism, in regards to pointing out the limitations of force and power in terms of spreading a language. This is apart from good observations on the nature of English and the fall of Latin. ( )

very detailed, exhaustive, fascinating ( )

I really enjoyed this book, even more than I expected that I would. About three (?) years ago I had it out of the library and managed to read the first section or about 20% of the book. It was very slow going because so much of the history was either new to me or not quite remembered from years before and I had done almost no reading on how languages develop and change. So I ran out of time (no more renewals) and took the book back to the library with the intention of checking it out again some day. Well that day finally came after much reading in language, history, etc. in my 888 and 999 challenges, This time Ostler's book was much easier to read and still a fascinating study of the history of the world's major languages, past and present. It also dovetailed rather nicely with the book by Joseph Campbell that I was reading concurrently.

Highly recommended.

A history of the world's major languages and how they have spread over the past few thousand years. Looks to be a delightful work.