What Are You Reading?

Before that it was "Shantarum," by Gregory David Roberts. also, quite good and long, 930 pages. I'm not sure if it is fiction or nonfiction.It is presented as non-f but after reading.....

Europe is a wonderful place, but when we go travelling, English-speakers tend to ignore the continent’s beautiful and bewildering variety of languages. In Lingo, Gaston Dorren leads a guided tour through Europe’s linguistic landscape, taking in Shelta, the language of Irish Travellers; Ossetian, an Iranian language spoken on the border between Russia and Georgia; and Monégasque, a subdialect of a dialect of Italian with about 100 native speakers which is taught for seven compulsory years in Monaco’s schools.

Lingo is that rare thing: a book about language that manages to be both genuinely interesting and enormous fun. Particularly impressive is Dorren’s ability to flip with ease from jokes and surprising facts to the discussion of complex linguistic ideas. He uses Basque to explain the workings of an ergative language, while his account of Icelandic offers an overview of the factors that cause language change. In between a comic dialogue about Hungarian and a satire on the political tussles around Belarusian, you’ll find a five-page crash course in the Cyrillic alphabet. Throughout, Dorren weaves in key ideas from historical linguistics and sociolinguistics without ever appearing pompous or obtuse.

Swedish makes for a fascinating case study in the social life of language. Until the end of the Sixties, Swedes had to navigate between a series of complicated terms of address, which took into account gender, societal position, formality of occasion and a number of other niceties. The pronoun du was reserved for usage with children, lovers, and friends who had shared a “du-drink”. The Sixties changed all of this, but nowadays there’s been some movement to the more formal ni, while some have argued for abandoning second-person pronouns altogether.

Dorren gives space to the stories of languages lost or just limping on. On June 10 1898, a landmine exploded on the island of Krk in the Adriatic. “There were two casualties,” says Dorren: “a man named Tuone Udaina, and the Dalmatian language of which he was the last speaker.” Today, there are around 500 languages that have fewer than 100 speakers, while some 50 languages have just one speaker remaining.

Other languages live on in strange forms: the last native speaker of Cornish died in 1777, but the language witnessed a 20th-century revival, complete with turf wars over correct spelling, usage and pronunciation. Speakers of Irish – of which I am one – have a tendency to treat the language like a carefully restored classic car: we’re very proud of it but rarely risk taking it out for a spin.

John Gallagher