An amazing book. The title reflects the reality, which is the war between languages,which we cannot look at without understanding the relationship between languages, politics and the economy. There are many reasons for this global historical conflict.
In this book, I liked the chapter of "Family Language War" in which it explained and how can a language conflict within a bilingual family arise, how it can be managed and how each party of the bi- insists on keeping their language the dominant tongue in the family and especially in raising up young children.
China's example is one of the leading in supporting one national language at the cost of other minority languages, as compared to India in which the state recognises a lot of minority languages and still considers them official.
The author was successful in presenting the Algerian case and Norwegian case , in which the will toward nationalising the language and cutting any contact with the past. Norwegian case was interesting and their search in the old dictionaries, for the purpose not used any Danish word is appreciated. I mean it is appreciated in the sense it is an effort toward self-dependance.
The Turkish case, in contrast, was a move toward escaping from the past, and building totally new alphabetical system which is the latin alphabets. Not to under-appreciate it, however, if we compare it to the Norwegian case, the latter is much deeper and reflects a mindset toward appreciation of own history, culture, past used speech.
As a fluent speaker of three languages, and a learner of another three, I can say, that this book has changed the way I look at the languages from a macro level. we cannot separate the view of the language from the view of own identity, own philosophical concepts, the economy and the politics as well, and as it appears that the Esperanto is still un-sucessful solution toward solving the "Bible" dilemma which will continue to exist.