English is the world language, except that most of the world doesn't speak it--only one in five people does. Dorren calculates that to speak fluently with half of the world's 7.4 billion people, you would need to know no fewer than twenty languages. He investigates these top twenty world languages, which range from the familiar (French, Spanish) to the surprising (Malay, Tamil, Bengali). Babel whisks the reader on a delightful journey to every continent of the world, tracing how these world languages rose to greatness while others fell away, and showing how speakers today handle the foibles of their mother tongues. From tongue-tying phonetics to elegant but confusing writing scripts, and mind-bending quirks of grammar, Babel is a testament to the idea of Charlemagne's that "to speak another language is to possess another soul." Among many other things, Babel will teach you why Russian has no word for blue, how and why Turkish stopped borrowing words from other languages, and why Arabic might be the hardest language to learn. Dorren forecasts the future of Chinese script, re-examines the Latin alphabet's gory past, and explains why you have to be very careful not to offend someone when speaking Javanese, which offers a choice of five different registers or khrong for most words in the language, depending on the social class of the person being addressed. Not a language for the faint-hearted. Witty, fascinating and utterly compelling, and a lot easier than learning twenty languages, Babel will change the way you look at the world and how it speaks.