Lingo Around Europe in Sixty Languages [Paperback]

Whether you're a frequent visitor to Europe or just an armchair traveler, the surprising and extraordinary stories inLingowill forever change the way you think about the continent, and may even make you want to learn a new language.

Lingospins the reader on a whirlwind tour of sixty European languages and dialects, sharing quirky moments from their histories and exploring their commonalities and differences. Most European languages are descended from a single ancestor, a language not unlike Sanskrit known as Proto-Indo-European (or PIE for short), but the continent's ever-changing borders and cultures have given rise to a linguistic and cultural diversity that is too often forgotten in discussions of Europe as a political entity.Lingotakes us into today's remote mountain villages of Switzerland, where Romansh is still the lingua franca, to formerly Soviet Belarus, a country whose language was Russified by the Bolsheviks, to Sweden, where up until the 1960s polite speaking conventions required that one never use the word you in conversation, leading to tiptoeing questions of the form: Would herr generaldirektör Rexed like a biscuit?

Spanning six millenia and sixty languages in bite-size chapters,Lingois a hilarious and highly edifying exploration of how Europe speaks.

Praise forLingo:

“[Dorren’s] deep and broad expertise allows him to take a familiar, mostly bemused approach to the linguistic patchwork of Europe . . . as enlightening as it is entertaining.”—Boston Globe

“A wonderful read . . . [Dorren’s] lively and insightful book takes the reader on a linguistic tour of Europe. In 60 witty, bite-sized chapters, Dorren makes sense of the babel of voices, exploring the origins of the continent’s languages and dialects and highlighting the surprise commonalities, stark differences and quirky singularities . . . Practically el“K