Empires of the Word
Nicholas Ostler
(Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
2005 HarperCollins
ISBN: 0066210860

A Language History of the World.

The story of the world in the last 5000 years is above all the story of its languages. Some shared language is what binds any community together & makes possible both the living of a common history & the telling of it.

Yet little of the history of the world's great languages has been told. Empires of the Word, by the linguist Nicholas Ostler, is the first to bring together the tales & the amazing innovations in education, culture, & diplomacy devised by speakers of Sumerian & its successors in the Middle East, right up to the Arabic of the present day; the uncanny resilience of Chinese through twenty centuries of invasions; the charmed progress of Sanskrit from north India to Java & Japan; the engaging self-regard of Greek; the struggles that gave birth to the languages of modern Europe; & the global spread of English.

Besides these epic achievements, language failures are equally fascinating: Why did German get left behind? Why did Egyptian, which had survived foreign takeovers for three millennia, succumb to Mohammed's Arabic? Why is Dutch unknown in modern Indonesia, though the Netherlands had ruled the East Indies for as long as the British ruled India?

Empires of the Word splendidly reveals the language history of the world showing the character of its peoples; &, for all the recent technical mastery of English, nothing guarantees our language's long-term preeminence. The language future, like the language past, will be full of surprises.

Nicholas Ostler is as fascinated by extinction as he is by survival. He thus traces the fortunes of Sumerian, Akkadian & Aramaic in the flux of ancient Middle Eastern military empires, & compares ancient Egyptian's three millennia of stability compares with the longevity of similarly pictographic Chinese.

That having been writ: this is one big book, covering the stories of our mother tongues, & is the way I love learning history. Sure there are armies marching across the globe bringing with them, besides war & pestilence, commerce, language & interpreters. There are explorers sailing the seven seas making landfall in strange places among stranger peoples, taking home unknown commodities & new words for them. There were also merchants who travelled overland, exchanging goods, customs & translations. All took their languages with them, becoming multi-lingual & creating new ones with which to barter & carry on diplomacy.

 • Why did Latin die when the Roman Empire collapsed & Greek survive?
 • Outside of the Middle East why is Arabic primarily the language of liturgy?
 • How did Chinese thrive even after millenia of conquests from outsiders?
 • How far from home did Sanskrit roam?
 • What languages did the Spanish conquistadors kill off?
 • How did European languages stay alive despite constant oppression?
 • What is the real career of English?
 • What are the Current Top Twenty languages of the world today?

Of the approximately 7,000 language communities in the world today, more than half have fewer than 5,000 speakers, with a thousand having fewer than a dozen: many will be extinct within a generation. At the top of the 20 global languages is Mandarin Chinese, with over a thousand million speakers, more than twice as many as English, with 508 million. Third is Hindi with 487 million closely followed by Spanish, with 417 million. How have these linguistic communities been created? Why did some flourish while others atrophied?

“...the search for the causes of language prevalence is not usually... easily resolved. In the historic record of contacts between peoples, and contests between languages -- when we have eyewitness testimony to keep us honest about what really went on -- we often cannot point to cultural differences that were clearly crucial. Then we may have to look deeper: not just into the perceived associations of the different communities, how they looked to each other, the language communities' subjective reputations as well as their objective advantages, but even -- and this is deeply unconventional, especially among linguists -- to the property of the languages themselves.” (p. 23)

Empires of the Word will certainly get the world of words talking, in all their various tongues. At 640 pages with Notes, Bibliography & Index, it is a dense, fascinating, informative, & accessible read.

I had one question which kept cropping up as I read: how were the early examples of languages read? From left to right? Right to left? I know Hebrew is written this way. Was Sumerian? Was there a prevalence of left-handed writers in the Fertile Crescent? When & in which language/s did we start writing left to right, & why? How is Sanskrit & Hindi written? & what about Chinese: is it top to bottom, & still so in newspapers & books?

Oustanding! For everyone interested in how we started writing.

With an Oxford BA in Philosophy & Economics & a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Linguistics, Nicholas Ostler's first job was as a university lecturer in Japan, which he still visits along with USA, keeping current with their progress in language technology.

Since 1982 he has led a series of European research projects in artificial intelligence & natural language processing (LOKI, KADS-II, DELIS, COMPASS). From 1988 to 1993 he co-ordinated UK government support to this field, in particular initiating the SALT program in Speech & Language Technology. He was a Chairman of the UK SALT Club, & an early proponent of the British National Corpus. He is on the Committee of the IEE Professional Group for Speech & Language Processing.

Since 1991 he has been managing director of Linguacubun Ltd, & is regularly called in for advice to the European Commission, to the UK Department of Trade & Industry, & Engineering & Physical Science Research Council, as well as a number of university departments with language processing interests, & internet start-up companies.

He is a Visiting Fellow in European Studies & Modern Languages at the University of Bath, & an Honorary Fellow in Linguistics at Lancaster University. Besides these business activities, he pursues research in the languages of Central & South America, & is also President of the Foundation for Endangered Languages. He lives just outside Bath, in England.
(07/17/05)

Rebecca