Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World Book

This is an absolutely fascinating, dreadfully boring book.

If you're at all interested in how dominant languages have spread and evolved, and how they impacted the linguistic development of all other languages in their regions, then stay away. If you're REALLY interested in small details of this subject, then this might be a good book for you.

Nick Ostler has this tendency, also, to latch on to small bits of evidence and make much of it. He's usually clear that he's doing this; he says, "We don't really know, but this is the way that I think makes the story most interesting, and there is some evidence for it, so I'm going to choose to believe it was this way." That's fine, and he's clear about it; and it's not like the book is poorly researched (there's hundreds and hundreds of footnotes). But he does recognize that the needs of a coherent story/worldview require that we take a few things on less evidence than we'd like.

Finally, the book is peppered throughout with lots of source-language citations for pretty much every language that he talks about. It opens up with an extensive passage in romanized Quechua, for instance. I thought this was awesome; although I wasn't entirely convinced that his (or his advisors) had written everything precisely right, and trying to get one's head around the numerous different romanization systems (to get a sense of what the languages actually sounded like and how they worked, his stated point in including these quotes) got really difficult. It's an admirable goal, but I don't think that it really worked as intended.

All that said, this was a dry book about a totally fascinating subject, and if you're interested enough in the subject, you'll put up with reading the book.