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.
General
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