I just finished reading The Power of Babel by John McWhorter. McWhorter is an American linguistics professor who has written many interesting books on various linguistic topics. As an African-American, he has a special interest in black American English and has written many books on the topic. The Power of Babel however is a general treatment on the history of the languages of the world. It is written for both linguists and laypeople alike and the author uses specific examples from wide reaching languages to show the amazing variety and complexity of human speech.
Of particular interest to me was the second chapter titled The 6000 Languages Develop into Clusters of Sublanguages. This chapter includes a treatment of the German language. With good humor the author explains how hard it was for him at times to communicate with German-speaking people in certain regions of Germany, even after having studied standard German for a number of years. This is due to the deep variance found between regional dialects and standard German or Hoch Deutsch. He includes humorous examples of the comic strip Asterix and Obelix to demonstrate his point. McWhorter makes the interesting argument that what is considered the standard form of a given language is somewhat arbitrary as someone unfamiliar with that language would not be able to distinguish between various dialects and what is accepted to be the standard form.
Another interesting topic of this book is language complexity. The overarching theme is that the more isolated a language is, the less speakers it has, and without the standardization writing brings, certain languages have developed to the point where it takes children until age 10 to be able to communicate in it on a basic level. These kind of complexities are hard to imagine for those of us whose primary language is one of the world’s top 20 languages. The author specifically references Luo, a language of Kenya. It has over millennia developed an entirely different plural form of each noun! For example, singular for the word man is bawo and the plural men is bape. Another language, this time a Native American language, Pomo, uses prefixes to demonstrate remarkable precision. For example, da-represents “by pushing with the palm” and therefore dayol means “to fold in dry ingredients!”
In sum, for an interesting read on linguistics without the dryness sometimes found when reading on this topic I highly recommend The Power of Babel by John McWhorter. Another work of his entitled What Language is and What it Isn’t and What it Could be is also a great read. If you have any book recommendations on languages, linguistics or related topics please comment below.
