THE FOLIO SOCIETY

When asked in 1898 to name a defining factor in recent history, the German chancellor Bismarck replied, ‘North America speaks English.’ To linguist Nicholas Ostler, that anecdote reveals how ‘far more than princes, states or economies, it is language-communities who are the real players in world history’. In this engrossing and original narrative, Ostler gives us five millennia of world history as seen through the ‘empires of the word’.

We can trace the birth of literacy to the ‘three sisters’ – Sumerian, Akkadian and Aramaic – in the Fertile Crescent of the late 4th millennium BC. Like empires, languages can rise and fall, but why did Egyptian fall out of favour before the advance of Arabic, while Chinese resisted over 2000 years of invasions? Languages must evolve, and Ostler explains how an insistence on linguistic purity can be linked to the death of Ancient Greek as a spoken language. In contrast, English is a chameleon: it was first transformed by the Normans, then 300 years later new economic realities in the wake of the Black Death led to the rise of the vernacular. In the following centuries, from its foothold in just one American colony in 1586, English grew to become the lingua franca of the world.

The author’s enthusiasm for his subject pervades his work (‘The language future, like the language past, is set to be full of surprises’). He includes vivid moments such as the fateful meeting between the conquistador Hernán Cortés and the Mexican ruler Montezuma, recorded both in Nahuatl and Spanish; and the pilgrim Egeria describing her encounter with a linguistic melting pot in Jerusalem around AD 400. Ostler is alive to the diverse character of different tongues (‘the stately self-possession of Chinese and Arabic, the sensuous prolixity of Sanskrit’), and shows their universal power to bind communities together in a shared heritage. This Folio edition includes a new introduction by the renowned language expert Professor David Crystal. Learned and entertaining, here is a book that opens our eyes to the extraordinary history of human communication.