Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World First Edition Edition

by Nicholas Ostler (Author)

119 customer reviews

ISBN-13: 978-0066210865

ISBN-10: 9780066210865

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The story of the world in the last five thousand years is above all the story of its languages. Some shared language is what binds any community together and makes possible both the living of a common history and the telling of it.

Yet the history of the world's great languages has been very little told. Empires of the Word, by the wide-ranging linguist Nicholas Ostler, is the first to bring together the tales in all their glorious variety: the amazing innovations in education, culture, and diplomacy devised by speakers of Sumerian and its successors in the Middle East, right up to the Arabic of the present day; the uncanny resilience of Chinese through twenty centuries of invasions; the charmed progress of Sanskrit from north India to Java and Japan; the engaging self-regard of Greek; the struggles that gave birth to the languages of modern Europe; and the global spread of English.

Besides these epic ahievements, language failures are equally fascinating: Why did German get left behind? Why did Egyptian, which had survived foreign takeovers for three millennia, succumb to Mohammed's Arabic? Why is Dutch unknown in modern Indonesia, though the Netherlands had ruled the East Indies for as long as the British ruled India?

As this book splendidly and authoritatively reveals, the language history of the world shows eloquently the real character of peoples; and, for all the recent tehnical mastery of English, nothing guarantees our language's long-term preeminence. The language future, like the language past, will be full of surprises.

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Ostler's ambitious and accessible book is not a technical linguistic study—i.e., it's not concerned with language structure—but about the "growth, development and collapse of language communities" and their cultures. Chairman of the Foundation of Endangered Languages, Ostler's as fascinated by extinction as he is by survival. He thus traces the fortunes of Sumerian, Akkadian and Aramaic in the flux of ancient Middle Eastern military empires. Ancient Egyptian's three millennia of stability compares with the longevity of similarly pictographic Chinese—and provides a cautionary example: even a populous, well-defined linguistic community can vanish. In all cases, Ostler stresses the role of culture, commerce and conquest in the rise and fall of languages, whether Spanish, Portuguese and French in the Americas or Dutch in Asia and Africa. The rise of English to global status, Ostler argues, owes much to the economic prestige of the Industrial Revolution, but its future as a lingua franca may falter on demographic trends, such as booming birth rates in China. This stimulating book is a history of the world as seen through the spread and demise of languages. Maps.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Caesar led his legions into battle for the glory of Rome--and the immortality of Greek. In the curious spread of Greek through Roman conquest, Ostler recounts one of the many fascinating episodes in the complex history of languages. The resources of the cultural historian complement those of the comparative linguist in this capacious work, which sets the parameters for a new field of scholarship: "language dynamics." By peering over Ostler's shoulder into this new field, readers learn how languages ancient and modern (Sumerian and Egyptian; Spanish and English) spread and how they dwindle. The raw force of armies counts, of course, in determining language fortunes but for far less than the historically naive might suppose: military might failed to translate into lasting linguistic conquest for the Mongols, Turks, or Russians. Surprisingly, trade likewise proves weak in spreading a language--as the Phoenician and Dutch experiences both show. In contrast, immigration and fertility powerfully affect the fate of languages, as illustrated by the parallel histories of Egyptian and Chinese. Ostler explores the ways modern technologies of travel and communication shape language fortunes, but he also highlights the power of ancient faiths--Christian and Moslem, Buddhist and Hindu--to anchor language traditions against rapid change. Of particular interest will be Ostler's provocative conjectures about a future in which Mandarin or Arabic take the lead or in which English fractures into several tongues. Few books bring more intellectual excitement to the study of language. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product details

Hardcover: 640 pages
Publisher: Harper; First Edition edition (June 28, 2005)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 9780066210865
ISBN-13: 978-0066210865
ASIN: 0066210860
Product Dimensions: 6 x 1.4 x 9 inches
Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 119 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #592,335 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #998 in Books > Textbooks > Humanities > Linguistics
- #1851 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Social Sciences > Linguistics
- #6536 in Books > History > Historical Study & Educational Resources

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Karen Myers

Good book that is ill-served by its ebook edition.

December 6, 2015

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

The book is excellent.

The ebook formatting, on the other hand, leaves a lot to be desired.

1) Images (and there are hundreds of them, including many special characters) only appear in the "View on your Browser" environment or (presumably) on a direct-networked Kindle device. They do NOT appear on the Kindle for PC reader or, therefore (I believe) in side-loaded Kindles. (And if you convert and read the file on an ePub device, they don't appear there, either.) You can read the book without the images, but you are missing a lot of the helpful illustrations, and most of the unusually accented characters.

2) Page references all point to the print edition and (of course) have no relationship to whatever digital device you use, nor are they live links.

3) eBook pagination jumps all over the map. For example, on my device, crossing a chapter boundary moved me from p. 662 (of 696) to p. 140.

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Matthew RapaportTop Contributor: Philosophy

Sociological examination of language history. Well written. Kindle version (at least) lacks maps and figures

October 11, 2017

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

I would give this book 4 stars, it was a good read. But I had something of an issue with the production of the KINDLE version of the book. I'll get to that at the end of the review.

In his introduction Nicholas Ostler says that his book is not a history of languages nor a comparative analysis of similarities and differences. But there is some of both in here. The focus, about which he says this is the first book, is a sociological examination of the regional (and eventually global) rise and fall of languages. His aim is understanding what factors, geographic, political, military, economic, and psychological, contribute (positively and negatively) to the history (rise, spread, maintenance, decline) of specific languages from antiquity to the present. Ostler goes back as far as the earliest writing. He covers the world from all of Far Eastern Asia (north and south), around to South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. With each group, he goes as far back as known writing allows and brings the languages forward to the present, mapping geopolitical events (world history) to their effect on the peoples of the regions (natives and interlopers) down to the present day.

This huge scope takes a lot of time. But the book is not as long as it appears as the text proper ends at the 76% point, the rest of it taken up by the end-notes which are copiously sprinkled (as links) through the text. This is nothing if not a scholarly work. One technical quibble, there are both "end notes" proper, and "end chapter notes" using different symbol sets (numbers for the end notes, '*', and other symbols for the chapter notes). But there are not enough symbols to cover the number of chapter notes and they must be repeated within a chapter. Moreover, while in most chapters, the chapter notes are properly linked in the text, in a few they are not.

In the end, Ostler is not able to cull the variety of language-impinging factors down to a few rules that predict what will happen to a given language. Given the geographic (world) and historical (7,000 years) scope of the work this is not surprising. No single language arc seems to have duplicated any other. No matter the various "similar factors", in each case there are also plenty of differences, and between the two lies an endless variation resulting in far more exceptions than examples of similar forces having similar effects. Nevertheless, the book does give one a sense of how the influences play out historically, the most important being the size of the language speaking population, the security of their regional political control, their geographic placement in the world, their placement in the history of technology. This was a long read to get to tentative and very generalized conclusions, but I think in this case there isn't much more that can be said. The book does a service by carefully evaluating the significance of the various factors impacting language evolution and geographic dispersion. I don't think Ostler has discovered anything new here, but he does well illustrate the impact of interaction between operative factors in broad historical periods.

I admire Ostler for taking on a really hard problem and making some sense of it, but the book's production (at least the Kindle version) was not up to the task. This is a subject that demands maps and figures. Strangely, the book refers to maps and figures only two or three times in the [long] body of the text. Worse, there weren't any maps or figures anywhere to be found in this Kindle version. Even the few he references, were just not there. Of course I cannot speak for their presence or absence in the hard copy versions, but I do not think there is any excuse for leaving them out of the electronic version. What is going on here? I do not know, but the lack of visual aids here takes a lot away from the value of the book.

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Amazon Customer

I'm not a linguist. This book made me think ...

August 6, 2017

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

I'm not a linguist. This book made me think thoughts I'd never had before. At my age that's gold.

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Karyna Kloude

Ditch your history textbook

September 24, 2016

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

The author takes an anthropological (cultural) and historical approach to linguistics, or put another way, a linguistic approach to history and anthropology. He proves that language is a viable way to study the movement of people and changes in their ideas and behaviors. It is one of the only texts (as opposed to textbooks, journals, and articles) that is fascinating to read and rich in information.

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October 10, 2017

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

Tracing the arc of a language from early through ascendancy to dominance reads like the back story to world history. Here the author addresses 20 languages with some form of dominance over the last 4,000 years analyzing why some survived for thousands of years and others for only as long as the empire survived. The answers are utterly fascinating.

For example, ever wondered why the Jewish people of 2000 years ago spoke Aramaic even though the religious literature was in Hebrew? The author attributes the triumph of a language used by nomadic groups over the market basket of Semitic languages to an internal political policy of the Assyrian empire requiring forced exile of large groups resulting in areas of no common language.

Most interesting from my perspective was the analysis of the predominance of English, Spanish and Portuguese in the New World. They are survived and flourished for different reasons. That Spanish is still not the dominant language in some countries brought to mind my experience in Bolivia where multiple translators were required to go from English-to-Spanish-to-Quechua and back because the majority of the country spoke Quechua!

Also of interest were reasons a language did not become dominant, such as German in Western Europe where it failed to dislodge derivatives of Latin.

One thing could have improved this book - illustrations. The author employs elaborate word pictures to describe precedents and antecedents of a language that were a little convoluted. A graph of each language family would have been most helpful.

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Eric Maroney

How Languages Life, Grow & Die

August 9, 2017

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Nicholas Ostler's Empires of the Word is wide ranging examination of how languages evolve, spread, and die out.

Ostler takes a wide view: we move from India, to China, to Arabic speaking countries, to Europe and end on English, the current lingua franca.

Ostler’s book is fascinating, and VERY detailed, so it demands some patience on the part of readers. But readers will be rewarded for their effort with some firm analysis of the complexities of how languages live and die.

Ostler does not leave us with any hard and fast rule about why some languages spread and others do not. Often, language spread because of conquest, as Latin did; or through a combination of conquest (British English) and prestige (American English).

Language is as complex and as multivariate as we are; really, we should expect no less.

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