"Spins the reader on a whirlwind tour of sixty European languages and dialects, sharing quirky moments from their histories and exploring their commonalities and differences ... [and taking] 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"--Amazon.com.

Originally published: London : Profile Books, 2014. Map on endpapers. Based on the author's Taaltoerisme : feiten en verhalen over 53 Europese talen. 2016-04

What Europeans speak -- Next of tongue : languages and their families -- Past perfect discontinuous : languages and their history -- War and peace : languages and politics -- Werds, wird, wurds ... : written and spoken -- Nuts and bolts : languages and their vocabulary -- Talking by the talk : languages and their grammar -- Intensive care : languages on the brink and beyond -- Movers and shakers : linguists who left their mark -- Warts and all : linguistic portrait studies.