Abram de Swaan

Biography

Abram de Swaan was Professor of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam. He has previously held chairs at Berkeley, Yale and the Sorbonne. His publications include De mens is een mens een zorg (Man is a Worry unto Man) (1982), Zorg en de staat (In Care of the State) (1989), De mensenmaatschappij (Human Society) (1996), and De draagbare De Swaan (The Concise De Swaan) (1999).

Titles

Words of the World

(Woorden van de wereld, 2002)

There are over five thousand languages in the world, and yet humankind has still retained its cohesion. Sociologist Abram de Swaan believes that this is due to the people who speak more than one language. As a result of multilingualism, certain languages within the global system have a kind of ‘umbrella function’, serving as a means of communication between the speakers of regional languages. For the last half-century or so the ‘supercentral’ language crowning this linguistic hierarchy has been English. Continued...