The History of Languages An Introduction

This is an introduction to the history of languages, from the distant past to a glimpse at what languages may be like in the distant future. It looks at how languages arise, change, and ultimately vanish, and what lies behind their different destinies. What happens to languages, he argues, has to do with what happens to the people who use them, and what happens to people, individually and collectively, is affected by the languages they speak. The book opens by examining what the languages are the hunter-gatherers might have spoken and the changes to language that took place when agriculture made settled communities possible. It then looks at the effects of the invention of writing, the formation of empires, the spread of religions, and the recent dominance of world powers, and shows how these relate to great changes in the use of languages. Tore Janson discusses the appearance of new languages, the reasons why some languages spread and others die, considers whether similar cyclical processes are found at different times and places, and examines the causes of internal changes in languages and dialects. The book ranges widely among the world's languages and mixes thematic chapters on general processes of change with accounts of specific languages, including Chinese, Arabic, Latin, Greek, and English.

Tore Janson is now affiliated to the Department of Linguistics, Stockholm University. Until his retirement in 2001, he was Professor of African Languages at the University of Gothenburg. Previously, he had been Professor of Latin at the same university and is a world expert on its history. He is the author of the international bestsellers Speak: A Short History of Languages and The Natural History of Latin.

List of Maps
List of Figures
List of Tables
Preface
Part I: Before History
1. Unwritten Languages
2. The Large Language Groups
Part II: The Basis of History
3. History and Writing
4. Hieroglyphs and Egyptian
5. Chinese -- The Oldest Survivor
Part III: Language Expansions
6. Greek -- Conquest and Culture
7. Latin -- Conquest and Order
8. Arabic -- Conquest and Religion
Part IV: Languages and Nations
9. Did Dante Write in Italian?
10. From Germanic to Modern English
11. The Era of National Languages
Part V: Europe and the World
12. Languages of Europe and of the World
13. How Languages are Born -- or Made
14. How Languages Disappear
Part VI: Recent Past, Present, Future
15. The Heyday of English
16. Chinese and English in China
17. And Then?
Chronology
References
Guidelines for Answers to Questions
Index