This book was an interesting look into the top 20 languages spoken by people around the world. While I did enjoy it overall, it did take me a while to go through. Most of the chapters do not follow much of a personal experience format and instead focus more on the linguistic characteristics or occasionally the history of the language. I don't think I would recommend it to someone unless they had a strong interest in linguistics. That being said, this book did inspire me to finally pick up Arabic on Duolingo and try learning how to read the Arabic script.

I had to read this book to do an essay for one of my intro to linguistics course. technically it does deliver, the author presents 20 chapters for 20 most popular languages in the world, there is a very precise and methodic deliberation of each chapter. Did I enjoyed it? No. Was it the most outstanding book we read in the course? Also no.

I always wondered how many languages do I need to learn to talk to X% of the population. This book is based on the same premise. While technically there may be cases where you count people more than once, I think it is a good motivation to analyze and discuss diverese aspects of the languages with the largest number of speakers.

At some point the book was a bit too technical, in others it was rambling about issues that were not directly related to the language in that chapter, but overall I think it was entertaning and I learned several things about Urdu, Turkish and Persian, among others.