Empires of the Word

"It’s a history of all languages – some have called it a macro-history. The ambition of this book is really extraordinary. There have been lots of histories of English, and there are lots of histories of other languages in those languages, but actually to try and write a history of the whole of language is an incredibly audacious thing, and Ostler pulls it off. So it’s a history of languages, the reasons for their rise and usually also the reasons for their fall. Most of the languages he writes about have rather faded from view. He concentrates on those that in some form or other have been globally or internationally influential. Obviously in later parts of the book you have English and Spanish, but going further back there is Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Sumerian, Akkadian and so on. None of those languages achieved the global spread that English currently has, but there have been tremendous linguistic empires in the past and they have tended to fall. That’s one of the interesting stories that he tells. It’s one of those books that’s full of very surprising information about the past, and I always get excited by books that tell a version of the past that I wasn’t expecting to hear. “None of those languages achieved the global spread that English currently has, but there have been tremendous linguistic empires in the past and they have tended to fall.” Ostler also very strongly takes the view, with which I agree, that language diversity is not a liability for the human race. Different languages nourish different cultures and suggest different pathways through experience and different strands of knowledge. Actually the different empires of individual languages intertwine in all kinds of interesting ways. It’s quite common for people to say: Wouldn’t it really be much better if we all spoke one language? Wouldn’t it be a great aid to human peace and collaboration? The answer is no, because different languages encode quite distinct cultural traditions, and having a plurality of languages actually makes life richer for all of us, particularly for people who know more than one language. This is a theme that comes up again in one or two of the other books – the sense that linguistic diversity is incredibly exciting. When languages become extinct, we should be unhappy rather than it being something to celebrate. Of course the ones that are disappearing are languages that have very few speakers, but when a language is lost something more is lost, too. There is a case for having language ecology, and certainly if you follow language loss to its logical conclusion there is something very deadening and homogenising about it. As someone who speaks English I benefit in lots of ways from the advance of English globally, but other people are victims of linguistic imperialism. Ostler writes about all this in a very interesting and unexpected way. He’s a very erudite writer but he’s also crisp and elegant. It’s a book that looks pretty daunting. It’s physically big. There are lots of odd looking words in it. There are passages of foreign languages in it. It’s one of those books you could pick up and think “it’s too rich for my blood”, but actually he’s one of those rare non-fiction writers who says something interesting and unexpected on every single page, and I think that this book is a masterpiece. It’s the sort of book that people will be referring to in 10 or 20 years, rather than the kind of thing that will be rapidly superseded. It is a really enduring work."