The Power of Babel Review

June 15, 2005

by Keith Law

“Properly speaking, there are no ‘languages.’”

So John McWhorter argues in The Power of Babel, his fascinating book on the history of human languages. Formerly an Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, McWhorter starts out by detailing when and how he first fell in love with foreign languages, something that everyone who visits this site can certainly appreciate, and then takes the reader down a path from the breakdown of the first human language into thousands of new languages all the way to today’s era of impending language extinction. Rather than hew strictly to that narrow story and timeline, he uses it as a rough framework for hundreds of digressions into the structure of languages, the way that grammar and vocabularies develop, and how languages transform themselves and each other over time.

McWhorter’s premise that there are no languages stems from a fundamental disagreement he has with the rigid and regimented taxonomy used by modern linguists to classify human dialects – and dialects, McWhorter writes, “is [sic] all there is.” The idea of “German” as a single language with a dominant form and a few fringe variations is inaccurate, and perhaps Anglo-centric, as English is one of the few world languages that does not have mutually unintelligible dialects. McWhorter illustrates his point with numerous examples, including a comparison of the same comic strip in “standard” German, Swiss German (which itself has multiple flavors), and the Schwäbisch dialect of Germany.

Instead, McWhorter argues, human dialects are inconstant entities like biological species, transforming over time, adapting to their environments, and sometimes becoming extinct. McWhorter leans heavily on the analogy to the Darwinian theory of evolution, although the analogy is imperfect enough that he has to jump away from it numerous times. While he writes of language extinction as a natural and even inevitable occurrence, he recognizes how much is lost when this occurs, and offers both some skeptical encouragement to revivalist efforts and admonishments to linguists to work to record dying languages for posterity’s sake.

The Power of Babel also includes numerous interesting excursions what would be a fairly boring linear story of the development of human dialects. Two of particular interest to the language learner are his listing of linguistic obstacles and his discussions of how languages change and simplify over time.

In discussing linguistic obstacles, McWhorter runs through all the major bugbears that stymie the would-be language learner – verb conjugations, noun inflections, genders, identifiers (articles or measure words), and tones – and explains how such awkward and non-communicative features likely developed over time. But he follows this up with a few sections describing how languages tend to lose some of this complexity later in their development as they spread geographically and demographically.

Unlike most linguistics tomes, The Power of Babel is readable and entertaining; McWhorter uses copious pop culture references and breaks up some of the more didactic sections with breezier (if only slightly relevant) tangents. From the perspective of the language learner, some sections will hold less interest; the chapter on pidgins and creoles ran on too long for my tastes, and the epilogue on the impossibility of constructing the original “Ur-language” was dry and probably won’t hold the interest of anyone who isn’t already interested in historical linguistics. On the whole, however, McWhorter presents a provocative thesis and many strong anecdotes in a package that’s hard to put down. I strongly recommend it to anyone with an interest in learning foreign languages.

The Power of Babel, by John McWhorter. 336 pages. Perennial Books, January 2003.

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All content © 2005 Keith Law.