Babel: Around the World in Twenty Languages by Gaston Dorren (Nonfiction Book Review)

Babel: Around the World in Twenty Languages

by Gaston Dorren

published by Atlantic Monthly Press

on December 4, 2018

Genre: Non-fiction

Length: 320 pages

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Synopsis:

English is the world language, except that most of the world doesn't speak it--only one in five people does. Dorren calculates that to speak fluently with half of the world's 7.4 billion people in their mother tongues, you would need to know no fewer than twenty languages. He sets out to explore these top twenty world languages, which range from the familiar (French, Spanish) to the surprising (Malay, Javanese, Bengali). Babel whisks the reader on a delightful journey to every continent of the world, tracing how these world languages rose to greatness while others fell away and showing how speakers today handle the foibles of their mother tongues. Whether showcasing tongue-tying phonetics or elegant but complicated writing scripts and mind-bending quirks of grammar, Babel vividly illustrates that mother tongues are like nations: each has its own customs and beliefs that seem as self-evident to those born into it as they are surprising to the outside world. Among many other things, Babel will teach you why modern Turks can't read books that are a mere 75 years old, what it means in practice for Russian and English to be relatives, and how Japanese developed separate "dialects" for men and women. Dorren lets you in on his personal trials and triumphs while studying Vietnamese in Hanoi, debunks ten widespread myths about Chinese characters, and discovers that Swahili became the lingua franca in a part of the world where people routinely speak three or more languages. Witty, fascinating and utterly compelling, Babel will change the way you look at and listen to the world and how it speaks. 

My Thoughts: 

I don't usually review non-fiction unless it's for children but I've been very absorbed in this book lately and had a few things to say about it. 

I've been fascinated by languages lately and have been actively learning a few. I love that the internet bridges the gap between countries and cultures and allows us to converse about things we have in common. Learning new languages has helped me learn more about the world and the cultures and people within it. Likewise, I've learned more about the history of the world and have only wanted to learn more since then. 

That curiosity is why I picked this up as soon as I saw it at my local library. I'd already started learning at least three new languages so I needed something that could teach me a little something about each of them, and more. 

Of course, I skipped around to the languages that most interest me right now, and those that I am studying, but I perused the others as well. 

I was happy to see that some chapters included a lot of history about the language, which was exactly what I was looking for at the time. Other chapters focused on specifics within the language or the author's personal experience with that language. 

As the first book about language that I've picked up to read (besides a dictionary), this was quite informative for me. I've learned a lot more than I would have just studying the languages I'm currently learning and subsequently have learned more about language as a whole as well as that I have a lot more to learn!