Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

The National Review has an (old) interesting review of a book about the spread, growth, and death of languages around the world by Nicholas Ostler, a leader in the preservation of dying languages. The book is titled ‘Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World‘, here’s the obligatory Amazon link.

It’s an accessible book is not a technical linguistic study—meaning it’s not concerned with language structure but about the growth, development and collapse of language communities and their cultures over 5 millennia. In essence it is telling the history of the world through the rise and decline of languages; those that have been written down and which have spread geographically including Sumerian, Akkadian, Egyptian, Chinese, Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and the main European languages.

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