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3.5 stars

This is a neat little book, consisting of very brief chapters (usually 3-4 pages) highlighting some aspect of 60 different languages of Europe. I learned a lot of fun facts and some useful background from it. Some articles are very informative, while others are quite lightweight or lean heavily on humor, and overall I didn’t get as much out of it as this author’s other book, Babel, about the 20 most-spoken languages of the world. Perhaps just because I read Babel first, but also because slightly longer chapters allow that book to delve more deeply and explain more than this one does. Nevertheless, this is definitely a fun read for the linguistically curious!

Below, some fun facts:

- Language families of Europe: Indo-European is the largest, and it has 10 extant branches. Five major ones: Romance, Slavic, Germanic, Indic, and Iranian (other sources combine these last two). And five minor: Baltic, Celtic, and then three that only have one living language apiece: Greek, Armenian, and Albanian. At least one language from each of these families is found somewhere in Europe, as Ossetian comes from the Iranian branch, and Romani from the Indic branch.

- But not all European languages are Indo-European! Several are Finno-Ugric, including Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian. Maltese is Semitic. Basque is an isolate with no known living relatives.

- The Balkans feature a diverse jumble of languages: the isolated Greek and Albanian, plus Bulgarian, Macedonian and Serbo-Croatian (Slavic), plus Romanian (Romance), plus Turkish. As a result they’ve picked up elements from each other: putting articles at the end of a word, avoiding infinitives, forming the future tense with a single word (which coincidentally, English also does).

- Icelandic has changed so little over the centuries that its speakers can still read medieval sagas for fun, a bit like the way English speakers can read 19th century novels. Isolation alone doesn’t do this; a long history of literacy, close connectedness throughout the country, and lack of youth culture are also potential contributors.

- Spoken Norwegian varies wildly over the country, though everyone manages to understand each other. And there are four candidates for the official written language!

- Until around the 1960s, Swedish had no second person singular pronoun (“you�) appropriate to most contexts; instead, you had to address people in the third person by their name or title with appropriate degrees of respectfulness given their relative standing in relation to yours. (If you were offering the boss of your company coffee: “Would Mr. Director So-and-So like a coffee?� If you were offering it to your maid: “Would Agatha like�?�) The word “du� existed, but was only permissible in very close relationships or with children, otherwise denoting contempt. They’ve since democratized the language to allow widespread use of du, but there are still those who would prefer another form of “you,� such as the plural, applied to more formal situations.

- Ancient Greek exported words to the rest of the world, where many others used them to coin new words, with constructions that would never have been used in Greek. Modern Greek has picked many of these up anyway, essentially borrowing the loan words back!

- Many European languages make numbers very hard, essentially spelling out the addition or multiplication required to arrive at the number, which can make then calculating with it near impossible.

- Celtic languages seem to have quite robust preservation and revitalization movements, compared to endangered languages in much of the rest of the world: Irish, Cornish and Manx all have people genuinely dedicated to learning and using them. Meanwhile, Monaco has made Monegasque, a Romance language no one actually speaks anymore, mandatory in grade schools.

- Esperanto is weirdly complex and difficult for a language once hoped to unite humanity.