Lingo: Around Europe In Sixty Languages, by Gaston Dorren

I probably would have enjoyed this book a lot more had it not been for the very beginning and very end of the book. In the first paragraph of the book proper, the author takes English speakers to task for being pillagers of languages and thieves of their vocabulary, but largely uninterested in acquiring second-language fluency or mastery. While this is largely true, it is not true of everyone (certainly not of this reader), and it brings a note of unfriendliness to the author’s discussions about English as a whole. Despite writing in English, the author appears that this concession to popularity in a world where English is a universal language while the author’s native Dutch is not appears to bother him a great deal, since it comes up at the end when the author opines that in future generations people will learn Chinese, at least once its system of characters can be jettisoned for a reasonable focus on learning via the pinyin romanization system. I think that stories of Chinese dominance in the future are a bit oversold given the fraudulent nature of so much of Chinese economic growth and its terribly troubled internal structure, but it is not too surprising that the author sees the 21st century as the Chinese century inasmuch as the 19th century was Great Britain’s and the 20th century was the American century, it must be admitted. Still, aside from these two sections of the book and a few other snipes at the English language as well as the Turkish-based Gagauz language, which the author apparently cannot think of a single word that is suited for adoption into English, the book is at least generally humorous and written with a light touch.

This book is 60 chapters long and takes up almost 300 pages of reading, though given the scope of the author’s interests in European languages, this book could easily have been two or three times as long as it was, and still have been worth reading. The book’s chapters are divided into 9 parts. After a short introduction on what Europeans speak, the first part of the book contains seven chapters about languages and their families (I), including the conservative Lithuanian as the best example of surviving Proto-Indo-European (1), the separated siblings of the Finno-Ugric languages (2), the fragmentary nature of Romansh (3), the French obsession with its mother tongue of Latin (4), the baffling similarities of the Slavic languages (5), the Balkan sprachbund (6), and the mysterious tenth branch of the Indo-European family found in Europe in Ossetian, an orphan of the Indo-Iranian languages (7). The second part of the book looks at languages and their history (II) through the peaceful expansion of German (8), the obscure nature of Portugal’s origin in Galician (9), the decline of Danish (10), the remnants of Channel Island Norman (11), the Jewish languages of exile in Karaim, Ladino, and Yiddish (12), and the frozen-in-time nature of Icelandic (13). The third part of the book discusses the relationship of language and politics (III), with chapters on Norwegian (14), the struggle for the identity of Belorussian (15), the existence of Luxembourgish as a national tongue (16), the struggles of Scots and Frisian for acceptance as languages (17), the reforms of Swedish (18), the complex nature of Catalan (19), and the lack of goodwill among the Serbo-Croatian languages of the former Yugoslavia (20). The fourth part of the book discusses issues of spelling and pronunciation (IV) with regards to the orthography of Czech (21), the spelling of Polish (22), the confusing ambiguity of Scots Gaelic (23), the Cyrillic alphabet of Russian (24), a chapter that discusses how to recognize languages (25), the machine-gun nature of Spanish (26), the complexity of Slovene dialects (27), and the hidden nature of Shelta and Anglo-Romani (28). The fifth part of the book discusses languages and their vocabulary (V), with chapters on Greek (29), Portuguese (30), Sorbian (31, Latvian (32), Italian (33), Sami (34), and Breton (35), the last two of which are celebrated for the complexity of snow and numbers, respectively. The sixth part of book focuses on the issue of languages and their grammar (VI), with chapters on gender-bending Dutch (36), Romani cases (37), a proposed merger between Slovak and Bulgarian (38), the non-phonetic nature of Welsh (39), the ergative Basque (40), and Ukrainian (41). The seventh part of the book focuses on languages that have succumbed to or overcome extinction (VII), including Monegasque (42), Irish (43), Gagauz (44), Dalmatian (45), Cornish (46), and Manx (47). The eighth part of the book discusses important linguists and the languages of their studies (VIII), including the hero linguist of Slovak (48), the father of Albanian studies (49), the unexpected standard of German (50), the created Esperanto (51), the national hero who wasn’t of Macedonian (52), and the secular alphabet of modern Turkish (53). The ninth and last part looks at linguistic studies, warts and all (IX), of languages like the phonetic Finnish (54), the odd nature of Faroese (55), the meaningful silence of European sign languages (56), the unique alphabet of Armenian (57), the loneliness of Hungarian (58), the Afro-Asiatic stranger of Maltese (59), and the “global headache” of English (60). The book ends with suggestions for further reading, acknowledgements, photo credits, and an index.

When I first looked at this book, before reading its table of contents, and then the remainder of its contents, I wondered if the sixty European languages that the author would discuss were all languages of the present or if the author would talk about prestige languages like ancient Greek and Latin. And truth be told, there is some discussion of Latin and Greek, especially Latin as being the source of the romance languages as well as a healthy amount of vocabulary for languages like English and German. Even so, this book does focus on modern languages, and the author wades into subjects of considerable controversy, such as the status of Scots, the status of the Chinese sub-sub-family of languages [1], the nature of various Romany languages, sign languages and their histories, as well as the thorny issue of the Bulgarian/Macedonian and Serbo-Croatian languages. Unfortunately, most of these discussions and a great many other interesting ones are hindered by the fact that this book is full of short chapters that lack full development, and that frequently end abruptly when there is plenty of interesting material still to be covered. This book should honestly be several volumes in length, and it would be the better for some more development. As it is, this book feels like the linguistic equivalent of ordering the appetizer sampler at a restaurant and trying a few bites of a great many interesting dishes.

[1] Properly speaking, there appear to be somewhere around twenty or so different languages that are a part of Chinese, including larger ones like Mandarin, and some smaller regional ones. These languages, which spring from differences going back to the Middle Chinese spoken of in early medieval China, all have the same written forms but differ widely in pronunciation, as you would expect with that much divergence. The Chinese languages, moreover, themselves belong to the Sino-Bodic branch of the Trans-Himalayan family of languages, whose internal divisions are not nearly as well understood as those of the European languages, almost all of which belong to either the Indo-European or Finno-Uralic language families.