Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

“Monumental . . . [Ostler's] massive overview of major languages in world history puts the current global spread of English in perspective.”—Chicago Tribune

In this linguistic Thousand and One Nights, Nicholas Ostler creates the first history of the world’s great languages,, gloriously celebrating the wonder of words that binds communities together and makes possible both the living of a common history and the telling of it.

From the uncanny resilience of Chinese through twenty centuries of ...