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.

Praise for Babel

“Fascinating… Dorren has an eye for what makes languages stand out from the field… In the hands of a less gifted author, some of the material in Babel could come across as dry or intimidating. But Dorren (as you might expect) has a way with language, and an arch sense of humor… Babel is an endlessly interesting book, and you don’t have to have any linguistic training to enjoy it… As joyful as it is educational, and above all, it’s just so much fun to read.”—NPR

“A fascinating guide and a celebration of linguistic diversity and bilingualism, both sadly underappreciated in English-speaking nations.”—Guardian

“A linguist and journalist takes readers on a global tour of the world’s top 20 languages, from Mandarin, English, and Arabic to Swahili, Tamil, and Malay. How did these tongues come to prominence and what others are dying out because of them? Dorren explores the culture and quirks of each language with infectious curiosity.”—Newsday

“Eye-opening and thoroughly entertaining… [Dorren] is wonderful company: chatty, informative, enthusiastic… Babel is a story not of nouns and consonants, but of empires and continents. Language is power. Sometimes it is a matter of life, lust, and death.”—Times (UK)

“An accessible and entertaining dive into the most commonly spoken languages in the world . . . An excellent choice if you want to learn another language but can’t decide which one . . . Accessible to longtime language scholars and casual readers alike; a delightful collection of twenty small windows to much larger worlds.”—BookBrowse

“Babel—fittingly for a book on language—is about more than numbers. Dorren takes a clever approach… He doesn’t just give an overview of the languages discussed; he explores a theme or element in each one, sometimes drawing broader conclusions on language as a whole… Smart, punchy prose.”—Irish Independent

“Hugely readable… Dorren is both an intimidatingly gifted linguist and a wonderfully eloquent writer. You couldn’t wish for a better guide to the wonders of the world’s bewildering array of tongues.”—Mail on Sunday

“Dorren expertly unpacks the baffling exceptions and structural oddities of the world’s 20 most-spoken languages in his delightful latest… Dorren always succeeds in sharing his delight at the intricacies and compromises of human communication… Whether he is debunking common misunderstandings about Chinese characters or detailing the rigid caste distinctions ossified in Javanese, Dorren educates and fascinates. Word nerds of every strain will enjoy this wildly entertaining linguistic study.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Dorren offers an intriguing tasting-menu of the major standardized languages… An engaging and informative whirlwind tour of how major world languages are created, used and changed.”—Shelf Awareness

“In surveying this score of tongues, Dorren teaches readers a great deal about how languages survive, evolve, and spread… As he shifts focus from language chapter to language chapter, Dorren delves into social and political dynamics affecting speech and writing… A fascinating foray into global linguistics.”—Booklist

“Dorren proves to be a genial, fascinating guide to the modes, manners, and curiosities of the most-spoken languages in the world… A deft, spirited exploration of the connection of languages to a nation’s identity and culture.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Enthralling… Full of exciting stories and illuminating history lessons… Riveting.”—Big Issue

“The multilingual Dorren, who scored with Lingo: Around Europe in Sixty Languages, goes global with this study of language, culture, geography, and history. Some surprising facts: presumed lingua franca English is actually spoken by only one in five people worldwide, more people speak Malay than French, and Turkish has evolved so quickly in the last century that titles from the early 1900s are Greek to today’s speakers.”—Library Journal (PrePub Alert)

Praise for Lingo:

“[Dorren’s] deep and broad expertise allows him to take a familiar, mostly bemused approach to the linguistic patchwork of Europe . . . as enlightening as it is entertaining.”—Boston Globe

“A wonderful read . . . [Dorren’s] lively and insightful book takes the reader on a linguistic tour of Europe. In 60 witty, bite-sized chapters, Dorren makes sense of the babel of voices, exploring the origins of the continent’s languages and dialects and highlighting the surprise commonalities, stark differences and quirky singularities . . . Practically every page comes studded with at least one fascinating fact . . . illuminating and entertaining . . . [A] unique, page-turning book”—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Mr. Dorren’s language tourism takes in not just the familiar monuments of English, French, Spanish, and German but also the unsung marvels of Latvian, Cornish, and Luxembourgish . . . A brisk and breezy tour . . . Bulge[s] with linguistic trivia . . . [Dorren] has an eye for genuinely surprising detail . . . [His] book is a peppy advertisement for the rewards of having several languages in one’s head.”—Wall Street Journal

“[A] playful survey of sixty languages spoken in Europe . . . Dorren gives voice to an important linguistic truth: ‘Today’s errors tend to become tomorrow’s correct usage.’”—New Yorker

“Lingo features amusing tales from five dozen languages, languages that define the nations of Europe . . . a great example of how language helps us get a little insight into the many cultures of Europe.”—Rick Steves, Travel with Rick Steves

“A worldly delight . . . This language writer dazzles. His stylistic flair is more than just entertaining—it crystallizes abstract ideas he conveys through vivid imagery . . . Dorren approaches his subject with passion and humour. His chapters are diverse, each normally highlighting the peculiarities of a single language . . . Dorren’s pace is swift . . . For language tourists, Lingo is a tour de force.”—Winnipeg Free Press

“[Dorren’s] linguistic tour is fascinating, funny, surprising, and enlightening.”—Jane Ciabattari, BBC Culture (10 Books to Read in December)

Excerpt

When people speak Japanese, their gender matters a great deal. A good number of words and grammatical constructions are associated with either women or men. For starters, women are more likely to use slightly longer versions of words that make them—the words, and consequently the speakers—sound polite. Think of it as not only saying the refined word ‘luncheon’ instead of the more workaday ‘lunch’, but making the difference systematic by also saying ‘tableon’ instead of ‘table’ and ‘flowereon’ instead of ‘flower’. In Japanese, this politeness syllable is added not at the end, but at the front: hana ‘flower’ becomes ohana.

Next, women and men will use different pronouns to refer to themselves: while watashi is a formal word for ‘I’ or ‘me’ that both genders can use, atashi is clearly a women’s word and ore, boku and oira are men’s. Both genders will use the word for ‘be’ differently: in a sentence like ‘this is a spider’, men will include da for ‘is’ (‘this da a spider’), whereas women will omit it (‘this a spider’). They will use different interjections: for example, ‘Hey, you’ translates as Nē, chotto for women, but as Oi chotto or yō chotto for men; both men and women can use ā where English would have ‘oh’ (as in ‘Oh, how beautiful’), but only women may also choose ara or mā. Men may pronounce the diphthong /ai/ (rhyming with English lie) as /ē/ (rhyming with lay), whereas it would be unladylike for a woman to do so.

Speakers do not exactly break a hard-and-fast grammar rule when using elements normally used by the opposite gender, but they certainly break a social convention: they bend both a rule and their gender.