Empires of the Word - A Language History of the World
by Nicholas Ostler
Harper Perennial, HK$160
In Ridley Scott's futuristic Blade Runner, the hero Decker speaks a Sino-Japanese street patois. Given today's linguistic realities, it should have been a derivation of Spanish, now the majority language in the US, or perhaps Arabic, the fastest growing language in the world. It's not fanciful to conceive of a world in which English is of only secondary importance. Nicholas Ostler points that way in his fascinating, highly readable and informative book Empires of the Word. Be warned, though, this is a book to take in short sittings lest the richness of its detail overwhelms you. Ostler, who is chairman of the Foundation of Endangered Languages, makes generous use of maps and the literature of long-dead languages such as Sumerian to explain the 5,000-year ebb and flow of linguistic communities, of which there are today some 7,000 - more than half with fewer than 5,000 speakers, and 1,000 with fewer than 12. Languages rise and fall, which should give pause for a stubbornly monolingual English-speaking world already under challenge after a mere 200 years.