The Rise and Fall of the World's Languages ; Language Is the Handiwork of Billions of People and Perhaps the Greatest Creation of Mankind

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One of the surprises in the three years that I've been the copy desk chief for this newspaper has been the amount of evidence, in reader mail and elsewhere, of keen interest in language and its uses and abuses.

The past few months have seen a flurry of new books on language that will be useful to all sorts of people interested in improving their own writing and speaking. But this year's spring/summer crop also includes two broad linguistic overviews, one geographic/ historical and the other thematic/conceptual, that will advance readers' understanding not just of words and usage but of Language with a capital L.

Nicholas Ostler's "Empires of the Word: A Language …