Lingo: Around Europe in Sixty Languages

by Gaston Dorren

Kindle Edition

Published November 20, 2018

About the author

Having started to talk before I could walk, I remember my pre-schooler’s frustration at being unable to read. In my teens and later, I learnt a handful of languages sort of well; I've dabbled in many others since.

In recent years, I've published several books about language and linguistics, in both English and Dutch.
* Lingo (2014), about the languages of Europe; also available in Dutch (Lingua), German (Sprachen), Russian (Lingvo), Spanish, Swedish and Norwegian; Italian forthcoming.
* Babel (2018), about the world's 20 largest languages. Spanish, Mandarin (2), Norwegian, Italian, Polish, Russian, Korean, Vietnamese and Dutch translations are scheduled for 2019/20.
* Vakantie in eigen taal (2016), about the Dutch languages.
* Nieuwe tongen (1999), about heritage languages in the Netherlands and Flanders.

I live in Amersfoort, the Netherlands, with my wife, Marleen.

I have a rather catholic taste in fiction. In English, from David Mitchell, Pat Barker and Alain de Botton to P.G. Wodehouse, Jasper Fforde and Rowling's Harry Potter series. In my mother tongue, from Renate Dorrestein and the (van het) Reve brothers to many others of lesser international renown.

When it comes to linguistic non-fiction, I like John McWhorter, Guy Deutscher, David Crystal, Nicholas Ostler, Henriette Walther (French), Karl-Heinz Göttert (German), Lola Pons Rodríguez (Spanish), Marc van Oostendorp (Dutch) and Joop van der Horst (Dutch).

Reviews

[Tanya · Rating 4 out of 5]

In autonomous Greenland, Danish initially retained more official functions than in the autonomous Faroe Islands. But that has since changed as well: in 2009, Kalaallisut became the one and only official administrative language. With this move, Greenland achieved a unique position: the only country of the Americas (yes, Greenland is part of the Americas), from Canada all the way down to Chile, where the indigenous language doesn’t play second fiddle to that of its colonial master. [p. 56]

Subtitled 'Around Europe in Sixty Languages' in some editions, 'A Language-Spotter’s Guide to Europe' in others, this is an entertaining and readable discussion of linguistic diversity in Europe. Translated by Alison Edwards from the Dutch Taaltoerisme (‘Language Tourism’), the book starts with the prehistoric origins of proto-Indo-European ('PIE'), the root of most European languages. (Maltese, which is Semitic and thus Afro-Asiatic, is one exception.) 

Lingo's sixty chapters are grouped into nine sections, dealing with language families, language histories, languages and politics, written and spoken, vocabulary, grammar, endangered and extinct languages, influential linguists, and 'linguistic portraits' of a few other languages (including various sign languages). Each chapter focuses on one language, and concludes with an English word borrowed from that language (if any), and a word in that language that 'doesn't exist in English, but perhaps should'. I especially liked 'Omenie – a Romanian word for the virtue of being fully human, that is: gentle, decent, respectful, hospitable, honest, polite.' [p. 39].

This is a great book for dipping into, as the chapters are short. As a native English speaker I struggled with the whole notion of cases, but now understand them rather better. I marvelled at the spelling rules for Gaelic, and was fascinated by the instructions on recognising specific languages: the alphabet, obviously (Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Armenian...); specific letters (þ indicates Icelandic, ß indicates German, ħ indicates Maltese and does not have a 'name' in HTML); letter-patterns (if q is not typically followed by u then it's Albanian, if tx and tz occur regularly but no words start with r then it's Basque)...

And I learnt a lot of random facts. Artist Alma-Tadema's mother tongue was Frisian! Spaniards utter nearly eight syllables per second, as opposed to Germans who manage just over five! The last native speaker of Dalmatian was killed in a landmine explosion in 1898! The Cyrillic alphabet was legendarily created by St Cyril, a Macedonian: but his name was Constantine rather than Cyril, he wasn't Macedonian, and he didn't design the script!

Well-referenced and nicely illustrated (though some of the references to images 'on the previous page', 'above' etc should have been updated for the Kindle version): a fascinating and erudite read.