Empires of the Word

Mandarin Chinese with some 900 million speakers, alone ac‍

There are between six and seven thousand communities in the world today identified by the first language that they speak.

James Cook of Great Britain’s Royal Navy

Nahuatl as the imperial language of Mexico, and the progress of Spanish towards its establishment as the language

the Americas, Catholic missionaries slowed for centuries the spread of Spanish

languages are the most powerful tools we have to conserve our past knowledge, transmitting it, ever and anon, to the next generation. Any human language binds together a human community, by giving it a network of communication; but it also dramatizes it, providing the means to tell, and to remember, its stories.
It is not possible, even in a book as big as this one, to tell all those stories. Empires of the Word concentrates on the languages that, for one reason or another, grew out from their homes, and spread across the world. But even with such a stringent entry qualification, cutting the number of stories from many thousand to a couple of dozen, the remaining diversity is still overwhelming. In a way, there are so many tales to tell that the work is less a telling of a single story than a linguistic Thousand and One Nights.
We shall range over the amazing innovations, in education, culture and diplomacy, thought up by speakers of Sumerian and its successors in the Middle East, right up to the Arabic of the present day; the uncanny resilience of Chinese through twenty centuries of invasions; the charmed progress of Sanskrit from north India to Java and Japan; the engaging self-regard of Greek; the struggles that gave birth to the languages of modern Europe; and much later, the improbable details of how they were projected across the world.

languages guard our memories too

Real language is always found in some local variant: English, Navajo,

language is what makes us human, it is languages that make us superhuman.

The strength of a person is in his intelligence and his tongue.