Babel: Around the World in Twenty Languages

Today's post is on Babel: Around the World in Twenty Languages by Gaston Dorren. It is 320 pages long and is published by Atlantic Monthly Press. The cover is white with the title in five different language. The intended reader is someone who is interesting in the history of languages and how they develop. There is no foul language, no sex, and no violence in this book. There Be Spoilers Ahead.

From the dust jacket- English is the world language, except that most of the world doesn't speak it--only one in five people does. Dorren calculates that to speak fluently with half of the world's 7.4 billion people in their mother tongues, you would need to know no fewer than twenty languages. He sets out to explore these top twenty world languages, which range from the familiar (French, Spanish) to the surprising (Malay, Javanese, Bengali). Babel whisks the reader on a delightful journey to every continent of the world, tracing how these world languages rose to greatness while others fell away and showing how speakers today handle the foibles of their mother tongues. Whether showcasing tongue-tying phonetics or elegant but complicated writing scripts, and mind-bending quirks of grammar, Babel vividly illustrates that mother tongues are like nations: each has its own customs and beliefs that seem as self-evident to those born into it as they are surprising to the outside world. Among many other things, Babel will teach you why modern Turks can't read books that are a mere 75 years old, what it means in practice for Russian and English to be relatives, and how Japanese developed separate "dialects" for men and women. Dorren lets you in on his personal trials and triumphs while studying Vietnamese in Hanoi, debunks ten widespread myths about Chinese characters, and discovers that Swahili became the lingua franca in a part of the world where people routinely speak three or more languages. Witty, fascinating and utterly compelling, Babel will change the way you look at and listen to the world and how it speaks.

Review- Dorren takes the reader on a deep dive into twenty languages and particular parts of the these languages. Dorren gives a general overview about the language, its history and development, and then the special thing about that language. Like discussing the separate language for woman that is in Japan's history, what languages tone to tell the difference between words that are spelled the same or that do not have tone at all. It is an interesting history of language without getting too overwhelming the reader with too many details. Dorren is very passionate about language and how it is used in our world, not just as a way to communicate but a way that we, as humans, live in our words and how we use them.

I give this a book Three out of Five stars. I get nothing for my review and I borrowed this book from my local library.