From the Book - First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition.
Introduction: twenty languages: half the world
Vietnamese, 85 million: linguistic moutaineering
Korean, 85 million: sound and sensibility
Tamil, 90 million: a matter of life and death
Turkish, 90 million: irreparably improved
Javanese, 95 million: talking up, talking down
Persian, 110 million: empire builders and construction workers
Punjabi, 125 million: the tone is the message
Japanese, 130 million: linguistic gender apartheid
Swahili, 135 million: Africa's nonchalant multilingualism
German, 200 million: an eccentric in central Europe
French, 250 million: death to la différence
Malay, 275 million: the one that won
Russian, 275 million: on being Indo-European
Portuguese, 275 million: punching above its weight
Bengali, 275 million: world leaders in abugidas
Arabic, 375 million: a concise dictionary of our Arabic
Hindi-Urdu, 550 million: always something breaking us in two
Spanish, 575 million: ¿Ser or estar? that's the question
Mandarin, 1.3 billion: the mythical Chinese script
Japanese revisited: a writing system lacking in system
English, 1.5 billion: a special lingua franca?
