| Edition |
First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition. |
| Description |
360 pages : illustrations, maps, portraits, charts ; 23 cm |
| Note(S) |
Maps on end-papers. |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| Summary |
A tour of the world's twenty most-spoken languages explores the history, geography, linguistics, and cultures that have been shaped by languages and their customs. |
| Contents |
Introduction: twenty languages: half the world -- Vietnamese, 85 million: linguistic mountaineering -- Korean, 85 million: sound and sensibility -- Tamil, 90 million: a matter of life and death -- Turkish, 90 million: irreparably improved -- Javanese, 95 million: talking up, talking down -- Persian, 110 million: empire builders and construction workers -- Punjabi, 125 million: the tone is the message -- Japanese, 130 million: linguistic gender apartheid -- Swahili, 135 million: Africa's nonchalant multilingualism -- German, 200 million: an eccentric in central Europe -- French, 250 million: death to la différence -- Malay, 275 million: the one that won -- Russian, 275 million: on being Indo-European -- Portuguese, 275 million: punching above its weight -- Bengali, 275 million: world leaders in abugidas -- Arabic, 375 million: a concise dictionary of our Arabic -- Hindi-Urdu, 550 million: always something breaking us in two -- Spanish, 575 million: ¿Ser or estar? that's the question -- Mandarin, 1.3 billion: the mythical Chinese script -- Japanese revisited: a writing system lacking in system -- English, 1.5 billion: a special lingua franca?. |
| Subject(S) |
Linguistic geography.
|
|
Language and languages -- Variation.
|
|
Language and languages -- Juvenile literature.
|
| ISBN |
9780802128799 (hardcover) |
|
0802128793 (hardcover) |
|
Other Resources
