Babel: Around the World in Twenty Languages

 Sometimes, you can just judge a book by the cover. I saw this book on the shelf at the library and was immediately intrigued. The book did not disappoint.

You only need to know 20 of the thousands of world languages to be able to converse with half the earth's population. Alas, learning to speak that many fluently is beyond the skills of mere mortals. However, understanding a bit about the languages spoken can help to understand the people.

The author explores each of these top 20 languages. For each, there is a brief summary of the grammar, sounds, loanwords, exports, sounds, scripts and number of speakers. Then there is a discussion of the language. Or more accurately, a discussion of some topic that is in some way related to the language. 

The author's feeble attempts to learn Vietnamese consume most of that chapter. The various tones and sounds are only the first challenges of learning the language. (It is also a language with very few second language learners.) For German, we learn about a study of the "weirdness" of languages. German does score very high on the weirdness scale - but so do English and Spanish. Perhaps there are other reasons the language is difficult.

Japanese gets two chapters, one in the order where it ranks, and then a bonus one after Chinese. The initial one discusses the rules for "women's Spanish". The bonus one goes into explanation of why the Japanese writing system is so difficult. The Japanese chose to adapt the Chinese characters for their language. However, the Japanese language was so different, that they needed additional indicators to help make it intelligible. Thus hiragana (and katakana and romaji.) Using the Latin alphabet alone could make things a lot easier, but the writing system is already deeply ingrained in society and thus remains.

Some languages have experienced revolutionary change. Turkish suddenly switch to the latin alphabet. And that was only the begging. There were multiple attempts to "purify" the language to use just Turkish words. This resulted in massive changes to the vocabulary. (And included a number of "fake etymologies" to justify various words.)

For Javanese, the complexity was its downfall. It includes multiple degrees of formality, with some words being totally different depending on the formality. This may have become a strong part of the language during colonial rule. (The higher-status locals may have encouraged it as a way of keeping their higher position.) When it came time to choose a national language, the simpler Malay (Indonesian) was chosen instead of the the more dominant Javanese. 

Indian languages occupy multiple positions in the top 20 and have had much more language-related contemporary conflicts. Most Indian languages have their own script. To the uninitiated, they look like similar "hanging letters", but they are about as similar as Latin, Greek and Cyrillic scripts. There is strong identity associated with local language, and having a unique script is often seen as an important part of this. In the case of Urdu and Hindi, it is essentially the same language, with the Muslim Urdu written in Arabic script, while Hindi uses the Indian Devanagari script. In Sri Lanka, a large scale civil war took place between speakers of different languages.

The languages of European colonialists make up a large number of the to 20. The book explores the reasons why small Portuguese ended up sticking around in many of the colonies, while similarly small Dutch was mostly superseded by other languages. English and Spanish also hold huge roles in the former colonies. French still has some usage in former colonial holdings. However, the use of French as a lingua franca has faded.

The languages dominant in the world today are in different stages of their usage and dominance. Persian and Turkish both had periods of imperial dominance in the distant past. In Asia, there are many languages spoken by a large nation state. In Africa, there are a large number of languages spoken in close proximity. Often a "very important language" is used for official or external communication purposes. (This language is often English or Swahili.) The relationship of people with their language differs significantly across the world. English is dominant as a lingua franca today despite many quirks. What impact will AI have on languages? There are plenty of interesting things to explore.