Empires of the Word

This history of languages traces how speech communities rise, spread, and fade, from Sumerian and Egyptian through Chinese, Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Arabic, Spanish, and English. Ostler attends to trade, conquest, scripture, and administration as vehicles of a tongue, and to the limits of military power when a language fails to take root. Maps and timelines sit beside case studies of bilingual courts, missionary grammars, and creoles. The argument is that languages have careers distinct from the states that use them. The book is a comparative history of linguistic empires, not a textbook of grammar and not a single-nation story.

Bound in black Cloth. Gold slipcase.