Babel
Around the World in Twenty Languages
by Gaston Dorren
2018
The languages are sorted by total number of speakers. Each language is covered in a single chapter, except Japanese, which is revisited after the Mandarin chapter. The chapters concern the technical features, the history and culture which shaped and spread the language, and the relationship to other languages. Even for readers with no interest in languages, the stories of how they became world dominators would be fascinating.
Each chapter begins with a concise, but informative fact-file page which primes the audience with an elementary overview of the language. This helps the audience to understand what each language "is". If there was no overview, the audience would know only the name of the language, lacking any mental image of the concept behind the name. A book about art, for example, would usually show classic examples from an art movement, before talking about the history or technical aspects of the movement, otherwise a general audience would lose interest.
English is the language with the most speakers, and therefore it's likely to be familiar to most readers of this book. For this reason. I thought this book would start with the biggest languages and work towards the less familiar languages. However, the chapters go from Vietnamese (#20), up to Spanish, Mandarin, and finally English (#1) . I assume that this was done to give the reader a sense of rising magnitude as the book progresses. The wait for English may also keep the reader engaged, like a carrot dangling at the end of a stick. However, putting English, Mandarin, Spanish, Hindi-Urdu, and Arabic as the first five chapters would have the advantage of acclimatising the average reader to linguistics with familiar languages, before gradually introducing unfamiliar concepts.
The chapters
- Introduction
- Vietnamese
- Korean
- Tamil
- Turkish
- Javanese
- Persian
- Punjabi
- Japanese (part 1)
- Swahili
- German
- French
- Malay
- Russian
- Portuguese
- Bengali
- Arabic
- Hindi-Urdu
- Spanish
- Mandarin
- Japanese (part 2)
- English
The author
Gaston Dorren grew up as native speaker of Limburgish and Dutch, later studying English (compulsory), French and German in school. In his early 20s, he learnt Spanish. Since then he has studied Danish, Norwegian, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Esperanto, Russian, Czech, Dutch Sign Language and other languages. In 2014, he released the book "Lingo: A Language Spotter's Guide to Europe". While writing Babel, he spent a long time learning Vietnamese, and forming warm relationships with native speakers.In the book, his love of languages is heart-warming and his enthusiasm is infectious.
A 2016 interview for babbel.com with Gaston Dorren.
Conclusion
I'm greatly enjoying this book and I want to recommend it to everyone I meet. I wish I could write more about its content on this blog, but I need to avoid committing plagarism!Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoyed this article.
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