Gaston Dorren – författare

If you were to master the twenty languages discussed in Babel, you could talk with three quarters of the world's population. But what makes these languages stand out amid the world's estimated 6,500 tongues?Gaston Dorren delves deep into the linguistic oddities and extraordinary stories of these diverse lingua francas, tracing their origins and their sometimes bloody rise to greatness. He deciphers their bewildering array of scripts, presents the gems and gaps in their vocabularies and charts their coinages and loans. He even explains how their grammars order their speakers' worldview. Combining linguistics and cultural history, Babel takes us on an intriguing tour of the world, addressing such questions as how tiny Portugal spawned a major world language and Holland didn't, why Japanese women talk differently from men, what it means for Russian to be 'related' to English, and how non-alphabetic scripts, such as those of India and China, do the same job as our 26 letters. Not to mention the conundrums of why Vietnamese has four forms for 'I', or how Tamil pronouns keep humans and deities apart.Babel will change the way you look at the world and how we all speak.

A fascinating visual exploration of all things linguistic, tracing how words, sounds, scripts, norms, and borders are in constant fluxDid you know that more than 7,000 languages are spoken today, but that fifty percent of the world’s people use only fifteen of them? Or that there are hundreds of separate sign languages? Or that a dog’s bark is represented with wildly different sounds in English, Czech, and Thai? In The World Atlas of Language, Gaston Dorren, the international bestselling author of Lingo, Babel, and other books about languages, invites readers on a captivating journey that charts the geographical spread of languages and dialects around the world through the ages—and tells the incredible stories behind them in his unmistakable style. The result is an essential reference for anyone who loves how humans speak, write—and vary.Organized by theme and richly illustrated throughout with full-color maps, timelines, and other graphics, this book traces the origins and evolutions of the world’s languages and of the communities that nurture and live in them. From Old, Middle, and Modern English and the great linguistic variety of the Americas to the lingua francas of Africa and the many unique tongues that are about to fall silent, the atlas reveals an astonishing linguistic diversity.Features 100 full-color maps, timelines, and other graphicsTells engaging stories about the origins and evolutions of languages and how they have been carried around the world by nations, religions, and empiresIncludes sections on:Where—Where languages are spoken and where they have moved over timeWhat—Words, scripts, sounds, and grammarWhen—Language diversity and the way languages grow, decline, and change across historyWhat Else—Language and nationalism, books and readers, names, and related topicsAn essential reference for readers interested in languages, words, and their histories

Welcome to Europe as you've never known it before, seen through the peculiarities of its languages and dialects. Combining linguistics and cultural history, Gaston Dorren takes us on an intriguing tour of the continent, from Proto-Indo-European (the common ancestor of most European languages) to the rise and rise of English, via the complexities of Welsh plurals and Czech pronunciation. Along the way we learn why Esperanto will never catch on, how the language of William the Conqueror lives on in the Channel Islands and why Finnish is the easiest European language.Surprising, witty and full of extraordinary facts, this book will change the way you think about the languages around you. Polyglot Gaston Dorren might even persuade you that English is like Chinese.