From the Book - First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition.
Introduction: twenty languages: half the world
20. Vietnamese, 85 million, linguistic mountaineering
19. Korean, 85 million, sound and sensibility
18. Tamil, 90 million, a matter of life and death
17. Turkish, 90 million, irreparably improved
16. Javanese, 97 million, talking up, talking down
15. Persian, 110 million, empire builders and construction workers
14. Punjabi, 125 million, the tone is the message
13. Japanese, 130 million, linguistic gender apartheid
12. Swahili, 135 million, Africa's nonchalant multilingualism
11. German, 200 million, an eccentric in Central Europe
10. French, 250 million, death to la difference
9. Malay, 275 million, the one that won
8. Russian, 275 million, on being Indo-European
7. Portuguese, 275 million, punching above its weight
6. Bengali, 275 million, world leaders in abugidas
5. Arabic, 375 million, a concise dictionary of our Arabic
4. Hindi-Urdu, 550 million, always something breaking us in two
3. Spanish, 575 million, ¿ser or estar? That's the question
2. Mandarin, 1.3 billion, the mythical Chinese script
2b. Japanese revisited, a writing system lacking in system
1. English, 1.5 billion, a special lingua franca?