So I've finished Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World by Nicholas Ostler. The subtitle does make the book sound more general than it is. You won't find (as the author says himself early on) anything about the migration of the Indo-Europeans, the Bantu-speakers in Africa or the Austronesians in the Pacific, since these all occurred before the advent of writing (or at least its arrival to the region in the last case). Also, the book concerns itself with the "major" languages only, so the chapter on Greek covers its history mostly from Alexander's conquest of the Persian Empire to the fall of Constantinople centuries latter, when Greek was a major lingua franca for eastern Mediterranean.
The book's main focus is on the rise and fall of the major world languages (e.g. Sumarian, Aramaic, Greek, Chinese, Latin, Sanskrit, Portugese, English, etc.), and examines how and why these rose and fell they way the did. I found the chapter on Sanskrit to be kind of boring, but the chapter on Spanish to be really enlightening. According to the author, the first two hundred years of Spanish rule didn't really spread Spanish throughout it's colonies; but it did spread the old imperial languages of the Aztecs and the Incas as "lingua generales" for the purposes of converting the Indians. It was only with the coming of the Enlightenment to Spanish America that the use of native languages was reduced and a policy of Castilianization was introduced. I'm not sure of it's entirely correct, but it certianly intriguing and I would love to learn more about. It shows nicely how the fate of world language are quite unpredictable and influenced by many unpredictable factors.
Right now I'm reading:
* 1491 by Charles C. Mann
* The Mismeasure of Man by Steven J. Gould
