The story of the world in the last five thousand years is above all the story of its languages. Some shared language is what binds any community together and makes possible both the living of a common
A lingua franca, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, is a "language used as a medium of communication between peoples of different languages." English has become the world's lingua franca-
“An absorbing, scholarly account of the history of the Latin language, from its origins in antiquity to its afterlife in our own time...Ad Infinitum treats its readers with the dignity of Roman citize
In the twenty-first century, can we really take the dominance of English for granted? In their time, Greek, Latin, Arabic, Sanskrit and Persian have each been world languages, sweeping the globe for c
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."So opens the Gospel of John, an ancient text translated into almost every language, at once a compell
Nicholas Ostler's Empires of the Word is the first history of the world's great tongues, gloriously celebrating the wonder of words that binds communities together and makes possible both the living o
