The battle of Babel

Apparently, this book is a work of ‘diachronic sociolinguistics’. Sensibly, the author doesn’t mention this disconcerting fact until the last chapter, by which time it is clear that diachronic sociolinguistics is not as terrifyingly obscure as it sounds. Empires of the Word bills itself as ‘A Language History of the World’, and charts the careers of the major world languages for which there are written records. The aim is to find reasons for language successes and failures, but to find them in historical, social, political and economic factors, not in explicit comparative linguistics. This makes the book surprisingly accessible to the non-specialist, since it reads more like a historical narrative than a dense academic study. Nor does it try, like other historical books with similarly vast briefs, to appeal too broadly. It is a serious work of scholarship, but one that can be read from cover to cover by the amateur enthusiast.

At the very least, Empires of the Word demonstrates the breadth of the author’s knowledge. He starts in the deserts of the Near East and Africa, concentrating mainly on the extraordinary linguistic procession of Akkadian, Aramaic and Arabic. There follows a detailed comparative study of Egyptian and Chinese and an (almost encomiastic) chapter on Sanskrit. At last we arrive in Ancient Greece, beginning the complex story of European languages, which culminates in a serious and honest study of the current dominance of English. These are just the bare bones, of course — Ostler rarely leaves a language history unexplored. Greater attention could perhaps have been paid to the recent history of Greek, but this is merely nitpicking.