PhilPaine.com

The title of this book is a lit­tle mis­lead­ing. Only a few of the world’s thou­sands of lan­guages are even men­tioned in it. What the book is real­ly about is the suc­cess­ful Lin­gua fran­cas, the lan­guages that achieved wide­spread usage through con­quest, trade, or cul­tural pres­tige. So his atten­tion focus­es on Akka­dian, Ara­maic, Greek, San­skrit, Chi­nese, Malay, Latin, Por­tuguese, Span­ish, French, Russ­ian, and Eng­lish, each of which expand­ed far beyond their eth­nic pud­dles. On this top­ic, it is a fine intro­duc­tion to the gen­eral read­er. Any­one who stud­ies world his­tory should read it. Ostler is at his best when talk­ing about San­skrit, which he obvi­ously is par­tic­u­larly attract­ed to. His expla­na­tion of why San­skrit is so rich in puns, for exam­ple, is very inter­est­ing. Else­where, I’ve writ­ten about the sophis­ti­ca­tion of the San­skrit gram­mar­ian Pani­ni. Ostler gives a clear expla­na­tion of why his work is so remark­able. Ostler is not, like many peo­ple who have writ­ten on the top­ic, unthink­ingly tri­umphant about the future dom­i­nance of Eng­lish as a world lan­guage. In the book, he shows exact­ly how a “uni­ver­sal” lan­guage can evap­o­rate its own util­ity and pop­u­lar­ity. Per­son­ally, I sus­pect that Eng­lish will retain its role as the “Latin” of this cen­tury, and that this will in no way inhib­it the renais­sance of local ver­nac­u­lars and new region­al play­ers. We are enter­ing a new age of lin­guis­tic wealth.