Lingo: Around Europe in Sixty Languages

Whether you're a frequent visitor to Europe or just an armchair traveler, the surprising and extraordinary stories in Lingo will forever change the way you think about the continent.

Lingo spins the reader on a whirlwind tour of sixty European languages and dialects, narrating quirky moments from their histories and exploring their commonalities and (more often) their differences. Most European languages are descended from a single ancestor, a language close to Sanskrit known as Proto-Indo-European (or PIE for short) but the ever-changing borders and cultures of Europe has given rise to a linguistic and cultural diversity that is forgotten in discussions of Europe as a single political entity. Lingo takes us into today's remote mountain villages of Switzerland, where Romansh is still the lingua franca, to Soviet Belarus, a country whose language was bowdlerized and Russified by the conquering Bolsheviks, to Sweden, where up until the 1960s polite speaking conventions required that one never address another directly in conversation, leading to tiptoeing questions of the form: "Would herr generaldirektör Rexed like a biscuit?"

Spanning six millenia and sixty languages in bitesize chapters, Lingo looks at how English has sat within a Babel of European languages, and is a testament to the great linguistic diversity of this cradle of civilization, as well as a hilarious and highly entertaining exploration of how Europe speaks.