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Words of the World: The Global Language System, by Abram de Swaan. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press; Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001. 253 pp. $72.95 cloth. ISBN: 0-7456-2747-1. $33.95 paper. ISBN: 0-7456-2748-X.
This is an unusually important book by an unusually important sociologist on an unusually important question: the global system of languages. And it is a specifically sociological study, not a study in applied linguistics. It is not necessary to be a specialist in the study of language-I am not-to appreciate the significance of the topic and the originality of De Swaan's treatment of it.
Abram de Swaan is one of the most senior sociologists in The Netherlands-a country noted for its polyglot population-and now University Professor at the University of Amsterdam. He has held the chaire européenne at the Collège de France, and Visiting Professorships at Cornell and elsewhere in the United States. He gained widespread attention among Anglophone sociologists with his 1988 book In Care of the State, a study of the development of health care, education, and social security in Britain, France, Germany, The Netherlands, and the United States since the late Middle Ages. Apart from its remarkable historical and geographical scope, the book was notable for De Swaan's extraordinary theoretical combination of rational choice theory and Norbert Elias' "figurational" variety of historical sociology in explaining the long-term "collectivising process"-how the risk inherent in "care arrangements" was gradually spread from parish to city and region and then to national levels of organization. In the section of In Care of the State that dealt with the spread of literacy and compulsory schooling, De Swaan stressed the role of conflicts between central and local elites over the imposition of standard national or imperial languages. He advanced a model that he called "the floral figuration of languages," and Words of the World developed directly from that. Its development was not merely theoretical, however, but involved extensive empirical investigations that took the author to many parts of the world.
De Swaan states the book's central proposition in his opening sentences:
The human species is divided into more than five thousand groups each of which speaks a different language and does not understand any of the others. . . . But nevertheless, the entire human species remains connected:...