Babel is an ambitious but disjointed exploration into the twenty languages which make up the mother tongues of over half the world's population. It's as diverse in its coverage as each language is itself. This makes reading Dorren's book cover-to-cover a challenge. There are impediments to the flow of each chapter and the book. To make linguistics and the entire text approachable, the author chose an informal writing style. However, this approach doesn't work as intended. The reader is either drowned in terminology or left wondering why a pithy mentioned concept is relevant to that language. The narrative repeatedly wanders off onto new topics after a brief remark, that make it difficult to see the overall picture of the language. Despite these flaws, this can be a useful volume for those curious about different languages. However, reader beware, it lacks a cohesive tie.

Babel: Around the World in Twenty Languages is an interesting survey of modern linguistics in the form of a discussion of the 20 most widely spoken languages in the world. Released 4th Dec 2018 by Atlantic Monthly Press, it's 361 pages and available in hardcover, ebook, and audio formats. Author Gaston Dorren is a linguist and language writer.

This is a very well written overview of the 20 most widely spoken languages in the world in the modern era. The prose is interesting and accessible to the layperson. Each language gets a chapter discussing the unique aspects of the language as well as its similarities to other languages with common influences. The chapters all have an introductory sidebar with bullet points including the self designated name of the language, the language family to which it belongs, its script/alphabet, grammar highlights, and other capsule previews.

The languages included (in ascending order of use by world population) are: Vietnamese, Korean, Tamil, Turkish, Javanese, Persian, Punjabi, Japanese, Swahili, German, French, Malay, Russian, Portuguese, Bengali, Arabic, Hindu-Urdu, Spanish, Mandarin, and English.

This is not a language primer; there's no vocabulary here, and reading the book won't help you learn any languages. What it does (and does well) is to illustrate in an accessible manner, some of the underlying structures which are unique to individual languages or which they have in common (and which ones).

I found this super interesting and cool. I was also surprised at some of the 'biggest' languages in the world which had made the list. If I had been asked -before- reading the book, I would have gotten about half the languages correct.

This is a wonderful resource for linguistically interested readers and would make a superlative support text for language learners.

Four stars. Super useful and there don't seem to be many general linguistics books aimed at the casual layperson; this is a good one.

A fascinating whip through the intricacies of various language -- highly entertaining. Especially enjoyed reading about Gaston Doran's challenge of trying to learn Vietnamese.

Not well organized

"Babel: Around the World in Twenty Languages" is a follow-up to "Mr. Dorren's 2015 "Lingo: Around Europe in Sixty Languages". You can see a theme here. I haven't read "Lingo" but it's said to be "breezy", and adjective I hardly associate with language.

Mr. Dorren begins with his failure to learn Vietnamese. Yes Vietnamese is a difficult language but people do learn it reasonably well and I kept wondering why a person who has studied so many languages had so much trouble with the structures. Pronunciation yes, the tones and all that, but why the structures when the language is written in a Latin script. A mystery.

People who study many languages learn each one faster than the one before if they have a good teacher and are motivated to learn. (I can't tell you how often I've played with French). Sir Richard Francis Burton the explorer, is said to have known 29 languages and could pick up a new one in a week. I'm not that good, but I can do a lot in 3 weeks if I have a good teacher. I haven't tried Vietnamese though and so I'll give Mr. Dorren some leeway.

But how does he manage to make the stories of these languages so very dull? Language study is fascinating, whether you come at from linguistics, history, culture, or learning. As other reviewers have mentioned, Mr. Dorren tries to present them all in some measure, but the theme keeps changing and there is no good rhythm.

Popular linguistics book, meaning it's not academic research but an interesting read with some insights into how languages are interconnected. Enjoyed the author's sense of humor and observations that some languages are quirky and the rules make no sense.

A breezy but knowledgeable nonfiction tour through the world's twenty most popular languages, as measured by their number of speakers, including both those who know the language as a first and as a second language. Dorren starts with a chapter on the smallest of the top languages (Vietnamese, at 85 million speakers), and progresses up the numbers through Korean, Tamil, Turkish, Javanese, Persian, Punjabi, Japanese, Swahili, German, French, Malay, Russian, Portuguese, Bengali, Arabic, Hindi/Urdu, Spanish, Mandarin, and finally, at 1.5 billion speakers, English.

Each language gets a chapter devoted to it, which opens which a brief introduction of the language and then does a deep dive into one particular issue, which might be linguistic, historical, or political. For example, the Japanese chapter discusses gender and language (not in the sense of <i>la chat/le chatte</i>, but how men and women use different vocabulary and grammar styles); Persian covers the past of the language, how it's spread over time, the empires it has ruled, and how various immigrant groups have shaped the modern language; Bengali looks at different types of writing systems; Swahili examines how multilingualism works in countries with many spoken languages; Punjabi takes on tones, how they evolve and how they function; and Tamil tells the story of official language repression and the civil war that resulted.

It's not the sort of book that will make you an expert on any topic, but if you enjoy learning interesting facts, it's a fun, easy read.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2723314202

BABEL by Gaston Dorren is a fascinating trip "around the world in twenty languages." He notes several lingua francas, languages like Portuguese, Persian, Russian, French, Swahili, Malay or even Turkish, that bridge the gap between people with different mother tongues. In addition, Dorren points to a number of languages (German, Japanese, Javanese, Korean, Bengali, Punjabi and Tamil) that make the top 20 due to the common characteristic of being spoken in compact but densely populated regions. Dorren indicates that "the figures are debatable, but it's safe to claim that at least 75 percent of people on this planet are able to communicate in one of the Babel Twenty." Each of those languages is covered in a single chapter, ordered by size beginning with Vietnamese (85 million users) and continuing through the top 5 (Arabic, Hindu-Urdu, Spanish, Mandarin and English). Each chapter provides a brief overview with a chart on characteristics such as script, sounds and exports; then, roughly ten to fifteen pages delve into the specific language, exploring culture, geography and history through a fairly academic lens. Dorren's website, Language Writer, contains a section about BABEL, including a page filled with sound files to help with clarifying pronunciation. BABEL received a starred review from Publishers Weekly and will certainly appeal to many readers, particularly those intrigued by linguistics, travel and vocabulary trivia.

Links on live post:
https://languagewriter.com/
https://languagewriter.com/next-book/sound-files/

Ahoy there me mateys!  I received this non-fiction eARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.  So here be me honest musings . . .

babel (Gaston Dorren)

Title: babel

Author: Gaston Dorren

Publisher: Grove Atlantic

Publication Date: Available Now!! (hardback and e-book)

ISBN: 978-0802128799

Source: NetGalley



Even though English is the "world language," the fact of the matter is that most of the world doesn't speak it.  This book explores the idea that to speak fluently with half of the people in the world, ye would need to speak 20 languages.  This book set out to explore those 20.

The concept of this book be fascinating.  The execution was sadly not to me taste.  Part of the problem is that the book didn't feel like a cohesive whole.  The chapters varied in style and focus.  There were often long tangents, that while interesting, made following the arguments being made difficult.  Other parts went into details of linguistics which were frankly over me head.  In addition, the review copy that I received was missing dates and figures.

I do believe that the author was enthusiastic and I did find many of the facts, like the formation of Turkish, to be amazing.  I so wanted to love this book but the presentation was muddled.  It was irksome and so I only read up to 54%.  Other readers may find this style worthwhile so I hesitate to condemn the book altogether.  I do hope this book finds its proper audience.  I am just not it.

So lastly . . .

Thank you Grove Atlantic!

Side note: from Amazon - "Gaston Dorren is a linguist, journalist, and polyglot. He speaks Dutch, Limburgish, English, German, French, and Spanish, and reads nine more languages."  How awesome is that?

Goodreads has this to say about the novel:

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, Babelwill 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.

To visit the author's website visit:

Gaston Dorren - Author

To buy the novel visit:

babel - Book

To add to Goodreads go to:

Yer Ports for Plunder List

Babel is an ambitious undertaking by linguist Gaston Dorren to explore the top twenty languages spoken in the world from the #20 to #1 spoken language (in which this review is written). As a native English speaker who has difficulty becoming more than monolingual, I enjoyed learning new things about the history and grammar of these different languages. However, I felt that at some time the book became too technical about linguistics and at other times would go off on tangents. It felt like the author was trying to pour all of his knowledge out of his head into one book. The chapter were in such different styles that the book lacked unity. Overall, I am glad I read it.

Thanks to NetGalley, Grove Atlantic, and the author Gaston Dorren for an electronic review copy.

If you love words, you’ll love this, and if you love languages, then you’ll love it even more. Dorren takes the 20 languages with the most speakers – out of the estimated 6000 languages that exist in the world today – and explores their origins and peculiarities. The expected ones are of course English, Arabic and Mandarin, but Tamil and Javanese are included in that 20 too – who’d have thought? Each chapter is devoted to a different language (although Japanese merits two) and the approach differs in each one, sometimes stressing the history, sometimes exploring tonality, sometimes exploring politics. It’s comprehensive and endlessly fascinating, and written in a clear and accessible (if sometimes random) way. I enjoyed it immensely. And I definitely won’t be deciding to learn Vietnamese….

This wonderful book, by a Dutch linguist takes the top 20 most-spoken languages and examines them in reverse order, making the #1 language the last chapter.

There are so many things to like about this book. First, it's very well-written with a fun, non-academic style by an author who is not afraid to poke fin at himself. Second, for each language he takes just a handful of aspects and uses them to examine the language. These topics can range from gender-based languages (Japanese), to the question of national languages and mother tongues (Swahili), or how very different languages can be more similar than you might think (Russian). Third, it's full of great little looks at the life and history of so many different peoples that I looked forward to every chapter.

Language is such an interesting, and revealing way to look at peoples that it makes this book delightful.

I'm actually a philologist and linguistics has always been one of my favorite areas of study. Therefore I thought Babel would be perfect for me... I mean, traveling the world through twenty languages that together can make you communicate with at least half of the world population? Sounds like pretty much a dream topic for philologists to me. Sadly, this book failed to hit the mark completely for me. There were a lot of editing errors in my ARC copy, with not only spelling errors and words stuck together without hitting the space bar, but also more critical ones like all the missing numbers and facts that haven't been incorporated yet (hopefully they will in the future). This made it a lot harder to read and slowed down the pace considerably. Also, I felt I was missing out by not having all the fun facts, numbers and comparisons. Editing issues aside, I had also problems with the writing style in general. Both the tone and style of each chapter seemed to vary considerably and simply didn't feel consistent to me. From a memoir style approach to an informal interview style and a history lesson; I just didn't feel I was getting to know each language equally. Not every chapter was as pleasant to read either as some didn't flow that well and had quite a slow pace. There were some interesting facts as well of course and I think philologists and language fans in general will still be interested in the title. I just hope at least the editing issues will be dealt with so we get the full package of information and little fun facts.

A fascinating look at the evolution of 20 of the world’s most spoken languages and the history that shaped them. No language is an island and the author explains in detail the symbiotic relationship that exists between several of the languages such as Urdu and Hindi. As I language student, I found the information interesting, however I tended to skip the chapters that weren’t currently of any interest to me. I read this as a .mobi file but having the actual book would have been better.

Books about English language, such as those by John McWhorter and David Crystal are some of my favorites, and I also like the "deep dive" into other languages, such as the books about French and Spanish by Julie Barlow and Jean-Benoit Nadeau. Then there's the books that dip a toe into many languages, such as this one by Gaston Dorren. Babel looks at the twenty languages that are spoken by the most people in the world. Dorren starts with some statistics to get you grounded, how many native speakers, where spoken, etc., and then takes off on whatever interests him most about that language. He discusses his difficulties in learning to speak Vietnamese, talks about how Japanese is spoken differently by men and women, looks at the history of the written Turkish language and how politics is inextricably linked to its development. It's just fascinating and it touches on many topics. Even if you aren't interested in 20th century Turkish politics (but you might be surprised to find that it is quite interesting), for instance, you might very well find yourself captivated by the astonishing number of words in English that derive from Arabic. (Thanks to Atlantic Monthly Press and NetGalley for a digital review copy.)

Babel was supposed to be a great linguistic adventure. Around the world in 30 languages Sounds exciting, doesn’t it. And I do have a serious interest in linguistics, so it seemed right up my alley. Until it wasn’t. At least, not quite what was expected. It’s a literary equivalent of meeting someone at a party and they tell you they are really into books and you’re really into books so you think you’ll have this awesome stimulating conversation, but turns out what really gets them going is fonts and paper. They are talking about what you both love, but not quite about the main things you love about it. Much like this book.Technically it does deliver, the author presents 20 chapters for 20 most popular languages in the world, culminating, of course, with the modern lingua franca English and some meditative contemplation of the future of it and future of sharing a language in general, since quite possibly the need is going to be taken care of with the translation gadgets soon enough. The language chapters varied very much in tone and context, it seemed like the author was trying to find a different approach each time, but it did create a certain lack of uniformity. What was uniform throughout is his attention to peculiar details and minute quirks of grammar and syntax as oppose to spending more time on the cultural and historical aspects of the specific languages. He did cover both, but in the proportions I was hoping for. And he did try to infuse the narrative with personality, but it often ended up reading like a jazzed up textbook as oppose to compelling account of linguistic adventures. There was a lovely amount of photos, though, to balance it out somewhat. And I did learn a lot, so in a way this book served its purpose. What really messed up this reading experience for me, though, were the publishers. And mind you, this won’t affect the final product, but the Netgalley ARC of it was horrid, apparently the great irony of putting out a crappily formatted version barely readable at times book on languages eluded Grove Atlantic, so they thought they’d offer this version with words clumped together, some letters omitted, moreover about 90% of all numerical data omitted and so on. So in theory these advance reading copies are offered in advance so that they can be hyped up by the reviews, right? Well then why wouldn’t someone present something actually presentable to be judged by? Would a restaurant offer an almost but not quite cooked meal to a reviewer and expect praise? It’s the same thing, really. If you can’t present a product in a way that is ready to be enjoyed, just don’t do it. There isn’t a scarcity of books out there to create desperation interest in the inferior product. Or at least have a decency of warning the readers beforehand about the dismal quality of the ARC they are about to download. This won’t matter for anyone who actually buys the book or takes it from the library, but anyone considering a Netgalley download…beware. So I enjoy nonfiction with the main goal of self edification and I did learn a decent amount of information, although the frustration of the actual reading experience made the worthiness of this read questionable. The entire thing was very much like a chore to get through with some, but not enough, informational delights and treasures along the way. Thanks Netgalley.