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Question: What is a language? Answer: a dialect with an army. So runs an old cynic’s maxim, which like many such crisp nuggets of tough-guy philosophy sounds thrillingly harsh and unillusioned the first time you hear it, and then starts to leave you more and more dissatisfied every time it’s trotted out. The trouble is that not many of us know enough about the history and ecology of languages to be in a position to qualify or rebuke it, so the cynical view that languages wax by force of arms goes generally unchallenged.

At which point, enter the metaphorical Seventh Cavalry. Nicholas Ostler is one of those rare souls who is fully qualified to take the broad view, and a few hours of agreeable browsing in his prodigiously informative study will be more than enough to help you silence most blowhards. It is perfectly true, you will learn, that some languages have won their way by spear and gunshot: “Brute military force,” he observes, “has determined the spread of Turkish to Anatolia, Spanish to Peru, Russian to Siberia, Japanese to Korea . . .”, and English to Massachusetts. However, he insists, these are only episodes in a much longer epic.

The scope of Ostler’s book is almost preposterously ambitious: the “language history of the world” is, after all, pretty much synonymous with the human habitation of the world, and, although Ostler approaches his grand theme from the point of view of an expert in languages and linguistics, he doesn’t stint his duties as a historian of military, social, religious and even agricultural history. One of the most remarkable virtues of the book is the sheer range and density of the information it manages to squeeze into its moderate format without conveying any sense of overload.

Much of the first half of the book is given over to the careers of ancient and/or venerable tongues — Sumerian, Akkadian, Phoenician, Aramaic, Chinese and Sanskrit; more than a third of the book goes by before Ostler reaches the relatively familiar territory of ancient Greek. The flourishing of English is a yarn postponed until well past the two-thirds mark — an act of deferral that helps emphasise the Johnny-come-lately nature of our astonishingly successful language .

Historical studies on a such a sweeping scale as Ostler’s have fallen into disfavour among academics, partly because they smack of the great (and sometimes eccentric) popularisers such as H G Wells or Toynbee, partly because they are necessarily synthetic projects, drawing more on the research of others than the author’s own archival burrowings. This isn’t entirely a snobbish objection, but in the case of an enterprise such as Ostler’s it misses the point: most of us are in far more urgent need of a reliable precis of available general wisdom than of primary work, however thrilling, on — let us say — regional irregularities in the supine stem of “confiteor”.

Lucid, thoughtful and capable at times of an appropriately Gibbonian wryness (“Dispassionate enquiry has never been an activity that appeals to a majority . . .”), Empires of the Word encompasses far too many phenomena to lend itself either to swift summary or to snappy take-home messages, but Ostler is prepared to stand by one grand general point: “World languages are not exclusively the creatures of world powers. A language does not grow through the assertion of power, but through the creation of a larger human community.” In place of the crude, might-makes-right version of history implied by our cynic’s maxim, Ostler proposes the useful idea of a “prestige language” — one which people actively seek to learn in large numbers because of the real or imaginary advantages it might bestow. English has been the prestige language par excellence (pardon my French) for the past 200 years, but increasing numbers of young people are turning avidly to the study of Arabic. They don’t want money and Macburgers and MTV, they want the Koran.

Ostler concludes his study with some speculations about the future. By around 2050, he suggests, Mandarin Chinese will still be the tongue with the largest number of native speakers, but English will be joined in second place by Hindi-Urdu, Spanish and Arabic, and demographics hint that Arabic will be, without rival, the language of the world’s young. The argument for teaching that complex language in our schools has seldom seemed more compelling.

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THE SUNDAY TIMES OXFORD LITERARY FESTIVAL

Nicholas Ostler talks about his book at The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival on Saturday, April 16 at 12pm.

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