D.he love of linguistic gourmets is mostly for the small languages, their grammatical flourishes, filigree sentence structures and strange terms, dominated by a few thousand or even a few dozen people. The Dutch journalist Gaston Dorren goes the opposite way in his book: He introduces the twenty largest of the 6,500 languages in the world, the big ships of global communication that have pushed or plowed under many of the smaller languages on their journey through history.
Imperial languages such as English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian and Arabic are part of it, but also major regional lingua franca such as Malay and Swahili. Dorren based his selection on the numbers of native and second language speakers. Even if such language statistics are seldom exact, they do reflect the order of magnitude. At the bottom of the top 20 are Korean and Vietnamese, with 85 million speakers each. With 200 million, German is in the middle. Unsurprisingly, Chinese Mandarin tops the list with 1.3 billion and English with 1.5 billion native and second language speakers.
The wide range of human expression
The ranking brings together the mother tongues of half the world’s population, and another quarter has one of these idioms as a second language. However, size is the only characteristic they all have in common. Their linguistic family affiliation, their sounds and grammatical rules and, last but not least, their writing systems differ greatly. At the beginning of each chapter, the most important information about the language presented there is summarized in the form of a fact sheet. Then Dorren concentrates on what makes this language special and what stands out in its historical development.
Gaston Dorren: “Around the world in 20 languages”. The greatest languages and what makes them so special.
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Image: CH Beck Verlag
The non-professional language portraits, written in a narrative-anecdotal style, fit together like mosaics to form an overall picture that demonstrates the wide range of human expression, even though it is only a tiny fraction of all languages.
When words reproduce movements in a sound symbolic way
The author explains the often very strange properties of languages such as Persian, Punjabi or Swahili using cleverly chosen comparisons with German. At the same time, an alienating light falls on German, and in the chapter dedicated to it, Dorren also focuses on its peculiarities. This includes the word order rules, which have been mocked repeatedly since Mark Twain, as well as the three grammatical genders.
German native speakers are likely to be less aware that the compulsion to always express the subject in a sentence in the form of a noun or pronoun is an exoticism from a global perspective: “Go to school” without “he” or “she” only works in German Colloquially and in the appropriate context. In most of the other languages of the world it is a perfectly correct sentence pattern. However, German as an eccentric is only first among equals: It shares a number of peculiarities with Dutch, English, Frisian and – parbleu – French, which owes not only its umlauts but also the obligatory subject pronoun to the Germanic tongues of the Franks.
Conflicts between India and Pakistan and between Hindus and Muslims
While Dorren uses Vietnamese to describe his wanderings as a language student in extremely foreign terrain in an amusing way, he picks out the ideophones of Korean. These words reproduce shapes, movements, proportions, sound processes and tactile perceptions in terms of sound symbols. This goes far beyond the onomatopoeia we know and illuminates the symbolic root cause of human language.
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source https://pledgetimes.com/world-languages-is-the-mandarin-age-approaching-soon/
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