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.