Babel : around the world in twenty languages /
English is the world language, except that most of the world doesn't speak it. Only one in five people does. Gaston Dorren calculates that to speak fluently with half of the world's 7.4 or so billion people in their mother tongues, you would need to know no fewer than twenty languages. He...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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New York :
Atlantic Monthly Press,
[2018]
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| Edition: | First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition. |
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Table of Contents:
- Introduction: twenty languages: half the world
- Vietnamese, 85 million: linguistic moutaineering
- Korean, 85 million: sound and sensibility
- Tamil, 90 million: a matter of life and death
- Turkish, 90 million: irreparably improved
- Javanese, 95 million: talking up, talking down
- Persian, 110 million: empire builders and construction workers
- Punjabi, 125 million: the tone is the message
- Japanese, 130 million: linguistic gender apartheid
- Swahili, 135 million: Africa's nonchalant multilingualism
- German, 200 million: an eccentric in central Europe
- French, 250 million: death to la différence
- Malay, 275 million: the one that won
- Russian, 275 million: on being Indo-European
- Portuguese, 275 million: punching above its weight
- Bengali, 275 million: world leaders in abugidas
- Arabic, 375 million: a concise dictionary of our Arabic
- Hindi-Urdu, 550 million: always something breaking us in two
- Spanish, 575 million: ¿Ser or estar? that's the question
- Mandarin, 1.3 billion: the mythical Chinese script
- Japanese revisited: a writing system lacking in system
- English, 1.5 billion: a special lingua franca?.