Babel: Around the World in Twenty Languages by Gaston Dorren

Another fascinating tour through the peculiarities and politics of language

If you are fascinated by foreign languages, Gaston Dorren’s books are a must-read. Babel, published in 2018, is the follow-up to Dorren’s excellent 2014 book Lingo: Around Europe in Sixty Languages. In both books, Dorren looks at many different languages, examining their histories, their structural oddities, and their political and cultural controversies. While Lingo focused entirely on European languages, in Babel, Dorren examines the twenty most widely spoken languages in the world today. Chapters devoted to each language are arranged like a top 20 countdown from least popular to most popular (though even number 20 has 85 million speakers, so they’re all winners here).

Though it delves into some complicated linguistic concepts, Babel is not written for linguists. Rather, if you’ve ever tried to learn a foreign language—successfully or not—and enjoyed it, chances are you have a linguistic curiosity that will find satisfaction in Dorren’s exploration of these top twenty tongues. Dorren expounds upon each language differently. Sometimes he will delve into the unusual mechanics of a language, such as his discussion of the grammatical peculiarities of German that make it one of the most difficult languages to learn, or his examination of the differences between male and female speech in Japan. He recounts his own attempts at learning Vietnamese, with limited success, and attempts to demystify Arabic by pointing out the numerous Arabic words that over the centuries have made their circuitous way into English. In many chapters Dorren explains the history of a language and its effect on the politics and culture of its speakers, such as Turkey’s ambitious program of language reform in the early 20th century, or how Persian and Malay became the dominant languages in their respective regions. Unfortunately, some of these histories involve genocide along linguistic lines, as has occurred for example in India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Dorren does not limit himself to spoken languages but discusses scripts as well, providing brief explanations of the Chinese and Japanese systems of writing, for example, or the differences between the different scripts used in India. In all cases, Dorren is really a wizard at concisely explaining the complex intricacies of language in terms that a general reader (not a professor of linguistics) can easily understand, and he manages to keep the discourse entertaining without dumbing down the subject matter in the least.

Although Dorren resides in the Netherlands, and Dutch is his first language, he wrote both Lingo and Babel in English. He then wrote the Dutch editions, which were published later. The English editions are clearly written specifically for an English-language reading audience because they include numerous examples comparing the grammar and vocabulary of different world languages to British and American English. In addition, Dorren is able to provide an educated outsider’s perspective on the English language, and he offers a balanced critique on its difficulties and oddities in a way that a native speaker who takes such oddities for granted could not.

Of Dorren’s two books, I would have to say I slightly prefer Lingo over Babel, probably because the broader scope of 60 languages allows for more intriguing anomalies among lesser-known languages. Nevertheless, Babel is really a fascinating and enlightening read. I look forward to reading whatever Dorren publishes next. I’d love to see him do a book where he can examine some of the more obscure languages of Africa, Asia, and the Americas.
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