Empires of the Word : A Language History of the World (original 2005; edition 2005)

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. ( )