Babel

Around the World in Twenty Languages

By: Gaston Dorren

Narrated by: George Backman

English is the world language, except that most of the world doesn’t speak it - only one in five people does. Dorren calculates that to speak fluently with half of the world’s 7.4 billion people in their mother tongues, you would need to know no fewer than 20 languages. He sets out to explore these top 20 world languages, which range from the familiar (French, Spanish) to the surprising (Malay, Javanese, Bengali). Babel whisks the listener on a delightful journey to every continent of the world, tracing how these world languages rose to greatness while others fell away, and showing how speakers today handle the foibles of their mother tongues. Whether showcasing tongue-tying phonetics or elegant but complicated writing scripts, and mind-bending quirks of grammar, Babel vividly illustrates that mother tongues are like nations: Each has its own customs and beliefs that seem as self-evident to those born into it as they are surprising to the outside world.

Among many other things, Babel will teach you why modern Turks can’t read books that are a mere 75 years old, what it means in practice for Russian and English to be relatives, and how Japanese developed separate “dialects” for men and women. Dorren lets you in on his personal trials and triumphs while studying Vietnamese in Hanoi, debunks 10 widespread myths about Chinese characters, and discovers that Swahili became the lingua franca in a part of the world where people routinely speak three or more languages. Witty, fascinating, and utterly compelling, Babel will change the way you look at and listen to the world and how it speaks.

©2018 Gaston Dorren (P)2019 Audible, Inc.

Beautiful insight to the world

Great details in the book for the world's languages. I use duo lingo a ton, so this book made me re think which language to pick next. Bilingual is ight, but why not learn all of them?!

I loved it, but it's not well-adapted to audio

I gave this 4 stars overall because I enjoyed it a lot and found it interesting. Also, George Backman did an amazing job with the various difficult pronunciations of a huge variety of languages. I was really impressed.

I do wish that more effort had been taken to convert the book to audio. It seems to have been read verbatim from the text, so there are odd parts when you'll have sentences like "word [x], which is pronounced [x]" that make little sense in audio format. There are also very repetitive parts where tables are being read line by line, which might have been better handled in an accompanying pdf.

That said, it was a truly interesting breeze through very different languages.

Highly recommended!

Informative, intelligent and entertaining! Everyone with an interest in language and culture should listen to this book - twice!

Breezy

The tone of this book is very breezy, intended to make a technical field accessible and entertaining. But sometimes because of that breeziness, the author ranges into ethnocentrism, and relies on goofy literary devices like dialogues with himself.