Babel

This book presents a handful of trivia and anecdotes for the world's 20 languages with the most speakers. It might be a showcase of Korean's onomatopoeia, Javanese's honorific system or - of course - Chinese's unique writing system. The trivia and anecdotes are something interesting, sometimes a bit boring.

This book is great if it's the first book you're reading about the world's languages, to get you interested for more language learning or linguistics. If you're already a passionate language lover, you're likely going to walk away from this book slightly disappointed that it didn't give you more thorough showcases of its languages. It's just an appetizer in that way.

I did roll my eyes a bit at describing specific language features as impossibly difficult to learn, and I hope this book doesn't encourage the kind of adversarial relationship many people have with foreign language learning. I'm glad, though, that the author took a clear stand against the myth that English is a lingua franca because of some intrinsic "easiness".

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.