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The story of the world in the last five
thousand years is above all the story of its languages.
Some shared language is what binds any community together
and makes possible both the living of a common history and
the telling of it.
Yet the history of the world's great languages
has been very little told. Empires of the Word, by
the wide-ranging linguist Nicholas Ostler, is the first
to bring together the tales in all their glorious variety:
the amazing innovations in education, culture, and diplomacy
devised by speakers of Sumerian and its successors in the
Middle East, right up to the Arabic of the present day;
the uncanny resilience of Chinese through twenty centuries
of invasions; the charmed progress of Sanskrit from north
India to Java and Japan; the engaging self-regard of Greek;
the struggles that gave birth to the languages of modern
Europe; and the global spread of English.
Besides these epic achievements, language
failures are equally fascinating: Why did German get left
behind? Why did Egyptian, which had survived foreign takeovers
for three millennia, succumb to Mohammed's Arabic? Why is
Dutch unknown in modern Indonesia, though the Netherlands
had ruled the East Indies for as long as the British ruled
India?
As this book splendidly and authoritatively
reveals, the language history of the world shows eloquently
the real character of peoples; and, for all the recent technical
mastery of English, nothing guarantees our language's long-term
preeminence. The language future, like the language past,
will be full of surprises.
Nicholas Ostler's serious interest in
languages took him from first-class honors in Classics at
Oxford and a doctorate in linguistics and Sanskrit at MIT
to teaching in Japan and a succession of research projects
from Crete to New Mexico, aimed at introducing languages
to computers. He then moved on to the problems of human
speakers and made himself an expert on the Chibcha language
of ancient South America, which yielded to Spanish in the
eighteenth century.
Nicholas Ostler is chairman of the Foundation
for Endangered Languages (www.ogmios.org), a charity that
supports the efforts of small communities worldwide to know
and use their languages more. He lives in Bath, England.
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