Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World.

• Author: Katz, Joshua T.
• Position: Book review

Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World. By NICHOLAS OSTLER. New York: HARPER-COLLINS, 2005. Pp. xxi + 615, illus. $29.95.

Every year sees the publication of a pile of trade books on language: what it is, how it changes, why English is either better or (usually) worse off now than when the author was young, etc. And most of these books are entirely superfluous, presenting between shiny covers the same pap, the same more or (often) less accurate answers to the same hoary questions. What a pleasure, then, to be able to say that Nicholas Ostler's work bears little resemblance to any of these and is in fact an unusually thoughtprovoking "big-picture" analysis of linguistic phenomena that is suitable for scholars and the interested public alike. This is a marvelously original investigation that every historical linguist will need to read, even though it is not about historical linguistics as that field invariably conceives itself. Ostler avoids asterisked forms and charts of pull- and push-chains in favor of a true narrative history, and his shot across the bows--"I believe that the universal study of language history, of which this is a first attempt, is at least as enlightening and valid a focus for science as the more usual concerns of historical linguistics" (p. xx)--has finally made me understand something that has long bothered me, namely why I and most historical linguists I know are so uncomfortable saying that we are historians. The fact is that we do not really practice history, (1) and yet our analyses could be much more interesting if we approached linguistic material with the idea that "[f]ar more than princes, states or economies, it is language-communities who are the real players in world history" (p. xix) and if we paid "attention ... to the growth, development and collapse of language communities through time, and the light these may shed on the kinds of society that spoke these languages" (pp. xx f.). Although Ostler nowhere mentions Jared Diamond, Empires of the Word, a "study of language dynamics" (p. 558), is in effect a language-oriented version of Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies (New York: Norton, 1997 [paperback, with a new preface, 1999]). (2) Ostler is, for example, taken with a recent theory of David Keys that the successful establishment of Old English in Britain in the mid-sixth century was aided by an epidemic of the bubonic plague, which will have hit the native Britons especially...