Babel: Around the World in Twenty Languages

From the celebrated author of Lingo, a whistle-stop tour of the world’s twenty most-spoken languages, exploring history, geography, linguistics, and culture—showing how the language we speak reflects our view of the worldEnglish 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, Ba