Oh man, this book was a slog.
I wanted to like it. I was very excited initially: at last a book about English's future as a world-wide 'lingua franca'. Will it continue to grow and flourish? Will it be replaced by some other language? Or will new technologies render the very need for a lingua franca obsolete? These are all questions Nicholas Ostler, author of the very good book 'Empires of the Word', promises to tackle.
And tackle them he does.... eventually. But in between the opening and closing sections, most relevant to his thesis, he has sandwiched a tediously detailed recounting of the rise and fall of almost every 'lingua franca' in recorded history.
I like history, but I am clearly a rote amateur next to Ostler. He seems to know the history of ancient central Asia like the back of his hand and assumes that the reader will too. Some of it was interesting simply because it was new to me (I knew very little about the Sogdians and their important role in trade before the rise of Islam) but a great deal of it was very dry. And Ostler's assumption seemed to be that the reader is almost as familiar with the subject matter as he is, which means that I was also frequently lost.
All these detours are ostensibly in the name of compiling evidence about lingua francas, but the material could have been much more briefly summarized to make the same basic points. It's clear that Ostler is simply fascinated by the interactions of ancient Turkic and Persian. And that he's used this book as an excuse to go on about them ad nauseum.
If those are his interests than power to him, but his enthusiasm was not effectively communicated to this reader. What should be a book that is accessible to laymen feels a lot more like a thesis paper written for academic peers, and a very specialized group of academic peers at that.
And after all that digging through the long dry middle of the book to get to what the book was ostensibly about, I didn't find his conclusions particularly compelling. Ostler suggests that the rise of nationalism will eventually relegate English from its lingua franca status to a mother tongue spoken mostly by native speakers. This will be largely due to the fact that Machine Translation (MT), technology along the lines of Google Translate, will make the need to use English to be heard by a global audience irrelevant.
Ostler may be incredibly well-grounded in linguistics and history, but his grip on the state of technology is not as impressive. While machine translation has come a long way, it has very definitely plateaued in recent years. There are numerous, very complex problems still to be solved. Personally, I find the evidence that we are a century away from the digital version of Douglas Adams' "babelfish" to be pretty thin. Ostler acknowledges some of the problems, but then simply dismisses them. No real counter-argument, just a "meh."
He also glosses over the so-called 'founder effect': virtually all the software and technology that global communications relies on was originated in English-speaking countries and written in English. This strikes me as a fairly strong argument for the continued importance of English for the foreseeable future. Ostler seems to think that as soon as non-English-speaking countries start developing their own software English's 'first mover' advantage will vanish, but as a programmer I don't think that's true.
For any country to do this they will have to duplicate decades of software development, all coded and documented in English. Familiarity with English will be a required skill for programmers for decades to come, if not longer. Unless Machine Translation really does advance by leaps and bounds in the near future, it's hard to imagine that the language of the vast corpus of American-developed software will suddenly become obsolete. Or that the ultimate information database, the World Wide Web, until recently almost exclusively the domain of English, will be rendered irrelevant.
It's unfortunate that this book was so long and slow and, ultimately, disappointing. I think Ostler really had two books here, one the dense and thorough exploration of Central Asian lingua francas, the other bold prognostications about English. One 'book' is of interest only to specialists, the other makes some interesting but not completely compelling arguments. If these two 'books' had been separated out I think he could have found an audience for each. As it is, this combined tome is simultaneously too demanding for the layman and not convincing enough for the specialist.
