Customer Reviews

Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

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This impressive work is a study of language dynamics over five millennia. Ostler deals with the birth, rise and decline of those languages that spread most widely through history, and the factors that played a part, like trade, conquest and culture. Of course the book is also by definition a history of civilization. The narrative begins in Sumeria and ends with English as the most important international language of today. The author rightly observes that the study of language history and historical linguistics will be mutually rewarding. He also attempts to indirectly capture the inward history of languages & the subtle mindsets that characterize individual ones, especially as regards the abandonment of mother tongues for new languages.

Part Two: Languages by Land, looks at the Middle & Far East: Sumerian, Akkadian, Phoenician, Aramaic, Arabic, Turkish & Persian, Egyptian & Chinese whilst chapters 5 & 6 considers Sanskrit & Greek respectively. The last two chapters deal with Celtic, Latin, German & Slavic. Part Three: Languages by Sea, explores the spread of Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, and the remarkable career of English. Part Four deals with the current Top 20 languages and reflects on the meaning and implications of the global survey.

The life-spans of languages differ greatly; if one compares Latin with Greek, for instance, Greek continued to thrive under Roman hegemony alongside Latin and eventually supplanted Latin again in the Byzantine Empire. Some significant civilizational languages like Latin and Sanskrit have all but died as spoken tongues, but they gave birth to rich families of related languages, whilst Old Chinese's pictographic script still serves its daughter languages very well.

A major change occurred around the 16th century when the European voyages of discovery spread the languages of Europe far and wide to the Americas, Africa and Asia. Launched by trade, these languages became tongues of empire through conquest. In that way Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and English spread around the globe. Dutch gave rise to the vibrant Afrikaans in Southern Africa and lingers on in some form or other in Suriname and on some tiny Caribbean islands but has disappeared from Indonesia. French & Russian are in decline, having lost much prestige and many speakers the last few decades.

Ostler differentiates between languages that grew organically (like Chinese) and those that grew by "merger and acquisition". Of the former, Mandarin Chinese is spoken by more than a billion people whilst English with around 500 million, is in second place. Hindi (derived from Sanskrit) is third with about 490 million, followed by Spanish in 4th place with 418 million speakers. Of course as a second language, English is of greater global importance than Mandarin. The book is full of fascinating facts and stuff that will appeal to linguists and hobbyists alike. For example: There are an estimated 7000 linguistic communities today, but at least half of them are on the verge of extinction with fewer than 5000 speakers. Within one generation many of these languages will disappear.

Migration was the primary cause of language spread. Global navigation arrived later and today we have electronic communication. There is an interesting passage of speculation on the future of English. Ostler identifies prestige & learnability as the two main growth factors in creating a larger human community. The first might offer wealth, wisdom or literary enjoyment to attract speakers. The ability to learn a new language depends on structural similarities between the population group's existing language & the new one. Owing to structural correspondences, Arabic took root where Afro-Asiatic languages like Egyptian & Aramaic were spoken but it could not displace Persian or Spanish. It is well known that speakers of Japanese learn Turkish easily but battle with English for the same reason.

For those interested in the many facets of language, I also recommend: On the Origin of Languages and A Guide to the World's Languages by Merritt Ruhlen, The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher, Genes, Peoples, and Languages & The Great Human Diasporas by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza plus The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language by John McWhorter. As a linguistic history of the world, Empires Of The Word is unique, highly readable and a valuable reference source. It contains many tables & figures as well as beautiful and informative maps. This well-researched and absorbing work concludes with notes, an index and a bibliography.

This book tells the history of the world through the rise and decline of languages. Nicholas Ostler has confined himself to languages that have been written down and which have spread geographically. They include Sumerian, Akkadian, Egyptian, Chinese, Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and the main European languages.

Of the approximately 7,000 language communities in the world today, more than half have fewer than 5,000 speakers, and 1,000 fewer than a dozen: many will be extinct within a generation. At the top of the 20 global languages is Mandarin Chinese, which has 1.052 billion speakers, more than twice as many as the next highest, English, with 508 million. Third is Hindi with 487 million and fourth Spanish, with 417 million. How have these linguistic communities been created? Why have some flourished while others languished?

From the author's picture, it is clear that there is no single model. The most important factors in the spread of languages have generally been conquest, migration, economic might and religion. But to succeed, what a language needs above all is prestige, or the ability to attract speakers.

Besides looking back to the origins of the written word, Ostler speculates about the future. In 50 years, he argues, Chinese will probably still be the most widely spoken language, while English, at least as a native language, might have stagnated.

Ostler's writing is easily readible and he keeps things going with plenty of anecdotes and interesting facts. So I daresay that this is a book that can be savoured by the professional historian and educated layperson alike. Besides, the book is not a difficult read (content: 5 starts; pleasure: 4 to 5).

Additionally, as a complement to "Empires of the Word", I would also suggest reading the following works, whose scope is as amazingly global as Ostler's: 1. Agrarian cultures: "Pre-industrial societies" by Patricia Crone; 2. Economy: "The world economy. A millennial perspective" (2001) plus "The world economy: Historical Statistics" (2003) by Angus Maddison (a combined edition of these two volumes is to appear on December 2007); 3. Government: "The History of Government" by S.E. Finer; 4 Ideas: "Ideas, a History from Fire to Freud", by Peter Watson; 5. Religion: "The Phenomenon of Religion: A Thematic Approach" by Moojan Momen; and 6. War: "War in Human Civilization" by Azar Gat.

Rebeccasreads highly recommends EMPIRES OF THE WORD as a dense, fascinating, informative & accessible read.

At 640 pages with Notes, Bibliography & Index, it will certainly get the world of words talking, in all their various tongues.

What were the origins of language, & where & when did they start?
Why did Latin die when the Roman Empire collapsed & Greek survive?
Outside of the Middle East why is Arabic primarily the language of liturgy?
How did Chinese thrive even after millenia of conquests from outsiders?
How far from home did Sanskrit roam?
What languages did the Spanish conquistadors kill off?
How did European languages stay alive despite constant oppression?
What is the real career of English?
What are the Current Top Twenty languages of the world today, & is their future secured?

EMPIRES OF THE WORD is the way I love to learn history, telling the stories of our mother tongues. Sure there are armies marching across the globe bringing with them, besides war & pestilence, commerce, language & interpreters. There are explorers sailing the seven seas making landfall in strange places among stranger peoples, taking home unknown commodities & new words for them. There were also merchants who travelled overland, exchanging goods, customs & translations. All took their languages with them, becoming multi-lingual & creating new ones with which to barter & carry on diplomacy.

Just one question: were the Fertile Crescent writers predominantly left-handed, & when & where did we start writing left to right?

Outstanding!

If John McWhorter's "Power of Babel" looks under the hood at how language's "engine" is assembled and how it energizes the word, Nicholas Ostler ranks the top models sold for their performance and handling. Ostler examines how the most successful languages throughout history succeeded or failed in perpetuating themselves as regional or, as with English, global means of communication. As a non-linguist but with training in English, Spanish, medieval and Celtic literatures and languages, I found particularly intriguing his chapters on these topics. Far slower for me were the densely detailed opening sections on Near Eastern, Chinese, Sanskrit, and related tongues. Here, too often, my eyes glazed over at the sheer amount of historical minutiae and tangential illustrations. This is the problem with much of this weighty tome: having to re-tell the rise and fall of language powers via their historical dynamics, history has to be recapitulated as well as the linguistic and, to a lesser extent, literary highlights. Jargon is less present than in many linguistic studies geared at a wider audience, but nothing's dumbed down. This book rewards concentration more than the quick dip by the browser, as much of Ostler's argument accumulates as the book continues towards the current rise of global English. Despite a rather uneven pace, due to the sheer difficulty in integrating so much history into so many languages, having a single volume devoted to what Ostler calls "diachronic sociolinguistics" or "language dynamics" (and he names this only on pg. 556, in the penultimate paragraph of the text proper!) is enormously useful for those of us non-specialists who need a compendium.

The encyclopedic and the narrative methods do jostle each other. Once in a while, as in his marvelous analogy of "two sisters," Judith (Hebrew) and Phoenicia (also going by Canaanite, he points out, in other words, the Palestinian predecessor), he finds the clever example to clarify his point. But such moments of inspiration are surprisingly few, and often as not nestled in the footnotes as emphasized in the text. This does make for a tough slog; despite many pages detailing why Aramaic overtook Akkadian, I was never confident that I understood precisely why. And the chapter organization means that some repetition keeps occuring; while cross-referencing helps retention, it does make for some awkward gaps. In the chapter on Greek, little mention of its Renaissance revival and less of its Arab hiatus is made--you have to wait for many pages for another examination of these factors, and it's disappointingly brief.

Yet, as the early modern eras loom, the pace quickens. In the fluid coverage of Spanish, the reasons for its missionary instruction and the need to teach it to adult learners (Merger & Acquisition) rather than the organic way of letting it grow through the native mother's child raising (as many languages do, for often the conqueror's language can lose out in the long run to the native, for the woman and the child tend to transmit the native and not the "foreign occupier's" language on to the next generations in the absence of females from the same first-language background to mate with the men when settling abroad) makes for provocative insights. Even here, however, the book jacket tells us that Ostler's an "expert on the Chibcha language" that yielded in South America to 18c Spanish; we get remarkably little of this story told--one paragraph!

Still, his coverage of English, too complicated to summarize here, shows why a reader needs to slog through so much material; his analysis and prognosis depends upon all of his previous chapters and dozens of earlier linguistic examples. It's instructive, to name only one point, how Germanic English bested British Celtic and Norman French not only due to military power but plague devastation. These observant chapters comprise the most lively part of the book, at least for a native English speaker I suppose. But he does seem rather too blase, for one who chairs a charity, Ogmios, to assist small-language sustainment, about the fate of threatened language communities; he shrugs that there's nevertheless 6,000 of them remaining. Yes, but he also predicts that half of these have their last speakers alive today. A tie between ecological and linguistic preservation might have illuminated his reflections better, without romanticizing the converse to the cruel calculus that has relentlessly led to language extinction as well as creation throughout the millennia he chronicles so dutifully. His scholarly mien expects dispassion, however.

Ostler's reflections on how native vs. second-language or foreign-language speakers of English will fare as it becomes global and more used as a "lingua franca" [sic] than as a first-language raise many wonderful speculations that I found engrossing and fresh. He opened my eyes to how difficult English orthography is, and how adaptable it still is despite its daunting and growing disjunction between print and speech. The end of this long volume makes the effort in reading it and learning so much--trivia and substance both--worthwhile.

Language is a touchy issue. Here in Canada, it's the foundation for our "Two Solitudes" of Anglo- and Franco-Canadians. Social mores, politics and education are bound up with the native language of the people engaging in debates. While this may seem like a local and limited problem, Ostler provides a sweeping picture of how language issues have permeated human history. Some have risen only to be swept away by invasions or shifts in population. Others, under the same stresses, have endured and even prospered. Is there a key to understanding why some languages have sustained their use while others fade? With immense scholarship and some fine language of his own, the author attempts to answer this and other questions about the durability of languages.

Unlike many books on language, this one doesn't rely on grammatical lineages or word tracing, but on the people's usage. Language, Ostler says, is the foundation of human community. The tie between an identified language and the culture it supports is intimate and enduring. To lose a culture may mean the loss of language - and vice versa. As this book's title shows however, empires have swept through populations without destroying the indigenous culture. Hence, some languages endure because the culture endured. Paying taxes to a new ruler may strip the purse, but not the mind. Foreign soldiers occupying a city are more likely to be forced to learn the local language for things as simple as buying food or asking directions. Stronger forces than armies are required to displace a language. The identity of a people isn't determined by occupation, but by interaction.

History has shown that economics can outperform armies in exercising an impact on language. Languages of trade have a long history of crossing boundaries. The Phoenicans, who never formed a nation of their own, were the major traders in the Mediterranean, interacting with many societies. Record-keeping for trade purposes laid the foundation for many subsequent languages. Ostler declares the Phoenicians provided the "primary education" for the remainder of Europe. Yet, no element of their language has persisted into modern times. Aramaic, on the other hand, was the "lingua franca" of Babylon and Persia. It resisted repeated imperial overrunnings until Greek supplanted it, at least among the educated. All these lingering or disrupted language developments show that no matter how dominant a language may seem to the people using it, a new or more powerful force may loom almost unseen before overtaking the established language with a new one. English, often considered the first "global" language, may sustain severe pressure as "global economics" continually shifts its locus of power.

In short, there are no simple, nor hard and fast, rules governing language persistence. The only certainty is that language changes and shifts from different causes. Economic forces and social changes derived from modern colonial enterprise has reduced language diversity. Of seven thousand language groups remaining in the world, more than half are sustained by a few thousand speakers. How many of these languages can be saved? Should they be saved? If the language forms the community, it will survive. If the community willingly changes its culture, the language will go extinct, as many have. Ostler's examination of these and a host of questions makes fascinating reading. With a strong sense of history and great insight for cause and effect, he's provided a monumental study. The book is more than just history and will prompt many questions as you turn the pages. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

In the fashion of Jorge Luis Borges, I have always dreamed of a book that contained the history of the world in which languages were the main actors. Thanks to Nicholas Ostler, PHD in linguistics from MIT, we now have such a book. Not only was I not disappointed, it exceded even my wildest dreams. It takes great knowledge and audacity to undertake this project, and Ostler has both.

This work focuses mainly on languages that have been widely influential. The first part of the book, starting 5,300 years ago, describes the spread of languages by land, from 3,300 BC up to the Middle Ages. The second part is an account of the spread of European languages as they conquered and colonized the world by sea. In the last part of the book, Ostler makes some predictions as to which languages will dominate in the coming century.

Instead of trying to summarize the book - which would be impossible in this space - I will highlight some of the more interesting points.

1)Why did Latin or one of its vernacualars not take root in England as it did in Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal? After all they were all domains of the Roman Empire. And why did Anglo-Saxon take root in England and nowhere else? Ostler speculates that most of the population died out from the plague leaving a linguistic void for the conquering Anglo-Saxons. However, there is no one determinent that will guarantee a language's staying power: factors include conquest, migration, economic power, and religion.

2)Why did Greek survive long after Greek civilization disappeared? It became a language of learning and prestige during the Roman Empire, and also latter in Constantinople during the Byzantium era. In a sense, it has parallels with Hebrew. Hebrew was not a vernacular from 100 BC until the 20th century, it survived mainly as a liturgical language, a language of learning.

3)In an excellent chapter called "The Triumphs of Fertility," Ostler compares Egyptian and Chinese. Both are rather cumbersome and unwieldy pictographic languages, but this also served as a unifying force in civlilizations with many mutually unintelligible dialects. Chinese and Egyptian civilizations were highly centralized with densely populated heartlands. Hence, their tremendous fertility prevented invading languages from overtaking them for thousands of years. Chinese is still with us today, but Egyptian was finally conquered by Arabic around 700 AD.

4)Sanskrit and Arabic are examples of languages that spread by being bearers of major religions. Arabic spread quickly across the Arabian peninsula and across North Africa through conquest. Arabic did not supplant the dominant languages of what are now Turkey and Iran, but both Turkish and Persian retain many Arabic words. It is a belief of devout Muslims that God's truth will only be revealed in Arabic, thus giving great impetus to its study. Sanskrit, which Ostler affectionately calls the "charming creeper," spread, not by conquest, but more by seduction and by organic growth. Sanskrit, as the language of Hinduism, gradually established itself in the subcontinent and latter in Southeast Asia. Today, however, only the vernaculars of Sanskrit are mainly spoken, Sanskrit itself has only about 200,000 speakers left.

5)After 1500, the European powers and languages began expanding by sea. Ostler gives accounts of why Portuguese, Spanish, French, Dutch, and English established themselves in some places but not others. In most cases, where the conquering language takes root is where entire families migrate and establish themselves in the rural areas, away from the imperial center. The English in America, Australia, and Canada, as well as the Portuguese in Brazil are examples of this axiom. This is why English did not do well in, say, India nor Portuguese in Indonesia.

This book is simply a tour de force. Ostler asks all the right questions and answers them very judiciously. After reading it you will start to think of the future in terms of which languages will be spoken.

Intended to be, as the author states in the last page, a study in diachronic sociolinguistics (that is a study of the varying social ranks and uses of several world languages through time) this ponderous essay will probably bear interest for the non specialists because it is well researched and nearly everywhere clear.
Quite often I found myself thinking about a well written article for a quality magazine aimed at educated readers.

Mr Ostler does not include every language, just those that at some time during their history acquired, for a variety of reasons, the status of world languages (that is languages spoken in many different nations), beginning with Sumerian and concluding with English.

He tries, and nearly always succeeds, to avoid the odious self-congratulary attitude of most western language historians who try to demonstrate that English (or French or whatever) was inevitably bound to acquire its dominating position among the languages of the world due to a vaguely explained superiority in both structure and "spirit".
Proof of this is the sheer number of pages dedicated to exotic languages such as Sumerian, Akkadian and Aramaic, often and unjustly neglected in their role of beacon of a civilisation far more advanced than what we usually think.
Only a rather cursory depiction of Sub-saharian and Turkic languages, possibly the least known to him, spoils this sensible approach.

As an amateur linguist myself I was mildly interested in the chapters about the non Indo-European languages because I lack a comprehensive information about them.
Yet, at the end of each chapter I found myself disappointed: the information provided is seldom more than superficial. Had he been more thorough the book would probably have topped the 1000 pages and probably lost the interest of the general educated reader but this is how I felt.

The chapters about Indo-European languages and, curiously enough, that about modern English were of no use at all to me but I suppose could interest those without previous knowledge of the subject.

Waiting for a second augmented edition that might never come out, this book is better left unread by linguists who will be able to do little more than commend the erudition of its author. The book could also represent a useful tool for undergraduate students of literature, linguistics and history.

This work, although focuses its attention on the main languages of the world, accesorily informs us on the importance and destiny of many other languages, so that who looks for a general history of the languages will no be dissapointed. Matters as the pervivence of Sanskrit in the Far East, the diffusion of Spanish in Latin America together with the survival of the "lenguas generales", or the undisputed predominance of English in North America finds a detailed chronicle and a sagacious interpretation. Also does the failure of German, Japanese and Russian in their attempts to unify peoples under their linguistic expression. Or the role of French, that surpasses the failure of a dissapointing colonial policy thanks to the intellectual brightness of its cultural legacy.
The Mesopotamic world, the Roman empire and classic Greek background, the Celtic migration, receive their meticulous treatment. Also are considered suitably the Chinese and Arab-islamic cultures, with which Nicholas Ostler manages to give us a very complete vision of the "empires of the word".
But for whom, -as it is my case-, does not master accurately the English language, the writing and the style are by moments too much academically british, forcing the reader to reread the text over and over again, in search of its precise meaning. However, I assume it like a personal problem, that will not necessarily share other non-english native speakers.
In sum, the book reaches with reliability its objective, that is to take care of the "empires of the word".
I recommend enthusiastically this book, and wait with interest the next works from N. Ostler's pen.

This is a history of the rise and fall of languages from the time of the Sumerians to the present day. The author is fascinated with why some languages became more important and widely-spoken than others and the relationship of language to empire. He asserts quickly that history offers no pattern or pat solution to this question.

Among the language histories that Ostler examines are the very-wide ranging Afro-Asiatic group, which encompasses Arabic, Aramaic, and Coptic among others, Turkish, Persian, Chinese, Sanskrit, Greek, and the major European languages. He focuses mostly on the literate Old World languages, although he has a chapter on Quechua and Nahuatl, the languages of the Incas and Aztecs respectively. As could be expected in a wide-ranging book, I found some chapters to be more interesting and informative than others. Scattered amongst the chapters are plenty of good maps and a large number of quotations and reproductions of inscriptions from a large number of languages. This is a well-produced book.

I'll give this book the highest rating, but I must comment that I was a bit disappointed with the cautious conclusions of the author. One of his more interesting statements was that Arabic, an Afro-Asiatic language, became established only in "territories that had previously spoken an Afro-Asiatic language" That suggests that the conquest of one language over another may have something to do with the similarity in structure of the language -- or, in other words, English is not likely to supplant Chinese or the reverse. This point is not really developed to its fullest extent. Also, the section of the book I most look forward to was "What makes a language learnable?" but it is very brief. I would liked to have seen a lot more discussion of his point that "the essence of a language, its structure, can play a role in its viability." That's a dangerous and intriguing statement in that it implies that some languages are "better' than others, a point that deserves more examination.

Smallchief

Not since Professor Henry Higgins has language come to the fore in as interesting a manner as it does here. Dr. Ostler (who speaks 18 languages) has written a view of world history based not on where they live but of the languages they speak.

He writes not only of the major languages (like the English I'm using to write this -- English, tied with Spanish as the second most popular language), but of languages long dead. He is able to trace the evolution of languages from common bases or roots to the variations that people are using today.

He further talks about what makes a language grow (birth rate, military/governmental control, religion). And he talks about conflicts that arise when incoming languages (Spanish in the case of the U.S.) define a minority of the people in a community.

By the way, if you hadn't guessed, the number one language in the world is Chinese -- 900 million speakers as opposed to 300 million for English and Spanish. Arabic is about 200 million, but like Hebrew is the language of a particular religion.

This is a fascinating book, made interesting by the light hearted writing style that relates the language being discussed to the rest of the world.