Babel

Around the World in Twenty Languages

by Gaston Dorren

Hardcover, 320 pages

Published Dec. 4, 2018 by Atlantic Monthly Press.

ISBN:: 978-0-8021-2879-9

(5 reviews)

English 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, Babel vividly illustrates that mother tongues are like each has its own customs and beliefs that seem as self-evident to those born into it as they are surprising to the outside world. Among many other things, Babel will teach you why modern Turks can’t read books that are a mere 75 years old, what it means in practice for Russian and English to be relatives, and how Japanese developed separate “dialects” for men and women. Dorren lets you in on his personal trials and triumphs while studying Vietnamese in Hanoi, debunks ten widespread myths about Chinese characters, and discovers that Swahili became the lingua franca in a part of the world where people routinely speak three or more languages. Witty, fascinating and utterly compelling, Babel will change the way you look at and listen to the world and how it speaks.

6 editions

mikerickson reviewed Babel: Around the World in Twenty Languages by Gaston Dorren

Review of 'Babel' on 'Goodreads'

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I don't usually log my nonfiction reads on here (which is maybe a third of everything I read), but I don't own this book because it was a library loan and I liked it enough that I wanted a way to remember it.

Being the wannabe polyglot that I am, books and articles and videos about languages and linguistics are always snagging my attention. This book offers a chapter each focusing on the twenty most-spoken languages in the world in ascending order (using best estimates of both native and non-native speakers). I've known that some of the biggest linguistic giants were Asian tongues with little exposure in the West like Bengali and Malay, but this was the first time I really stepped out of the Indo-European bubble to properly look at them and I'm glad I did.

I did learn a lot from this book, like the complicated formality hierarchy in Javanese and the breakneck pace of reforms that Turkish underwent in the 20th century. Most of the comments on this review page will mention a lack of coherence, which I agree with, but I think that was a feature and not a bug. The book seemed to go out of its way to not be overly formulaic and present each chapter as a dry presentation of facts in the same order. Consequently some chapters were better than others and I particularly felt that the Arabic chapter suffered from this concerted effort to shake things up, but I at least appreciate the attempt to keep things fresh.

If nothing else, I did walk away from this book knowing things that I didn't beforehand, so in my eyes it accomplished what I wanted to get out of it, even if there were plenty of peaks and valleys in the delivery.