A Polyglot’s Language Learning Roadmap: the Linguascape GPS

Language, A Tool of Empire

Said Antonio de Nebrija, the author of the first Castilian grammar, to Queen Isabela when asked what purpose it served. In other words, language is the soft power that supplements hard power, and, at times, defeats hard power.

Bismarck understood the soft power of English when he said that the decisive fact of modern life is that North America speaks English, a warning the second Kaiser Wilhelm ignored to his cost in 1914. Germany relearned the lesson in 1940…