Babel: around the world in 20 languages

What makes the 20 most spoken languages in the world stand out amongst the other 6,500? Combining linguistics and cultural history, this is a whistle-stop tour into the oddities and extraordinary stories of diverse lingua francas, tracing their origins and their sometimes bloody rise to greatness. Deciphering a bewildering array of scripts, this book presents the gems of a multitude of vocabularies.