Dividing the word.(Book Review)

Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World, by Nicholas Ostler; HarperCollins, 2005, $75.

FEW THINGS BOGGLE the mind more than the age of the earth--perhaps five billion years--and the human race--perhaps 100,000 years--and the extraordinary diversity of its thousands of languages.

There are still more than 6000 languages in the world, according to British language historian Nicholas Ostler in Empires of the Word. But, he says, so rapidly are languages dying that half of these are probably being spoken by the last generation to do so. And he says most people in the world speak more than one language.

We still know little about the origins or early history of languages or even when the creatures that eventually became Homo sapiens began speaking; and even Ostler's awesomely erudite book does not venture back more than about 5000 years, when writing first began to illuminate history.

We know that non-literate Aboriginal Australia had perhaps 300 different languages, depending on how defined, among perhaps one million people, and that similar diversity still exists in Papua New Guinea and elsewhere. Some of these languages are related, dialects gradually varying with distance until they become unintelligible different languages though seeming to stem from an original tongue; others are unrelated, separated by sharp linguistic borders with no obvious cause.

Ostler visited Australia in 2002. He calls it "that dawn-land of today's linguistics"--not an assessment often made of this wide brown land. He suggests that all the world was once linguistically like Aboriginal Australia, but over time bigger languages have squeezed out many of the smaller ones--as is still happening here, as Aboriginal tongues die out under the weight of English.

His main mission is to track this process over millennia and analyse likely causes. His book is a fruit of the science of linguistics, which originated in the early days of the Raj in India but was still virtually at the hobbyist stage until the Second World War. He uses extensive secondary sources and acknowledges help from a variety of language experts.