I love this book. It’s witty and informative, with a wealth of engaging comments on all things language-related on our continent.

Take Ludovit Stur, linguistic hero of the Slovaks, whose poems every citizen of that country can recite by heart: “Writing poetry was what public figures did in those days, much like appearing on television today,” he says of the literary past. Or, for “extreme athletes of linguistics,” there’s a section where the challenge of languages such as Faroese comes under scrutiny.

In following Gaston Dorren’s peregrinations through “lingo,” it’s handy to have a thorough knowledge of at least some part of the subject matter for an indication as to its general accuracy.

In my case that’s Welsh and Dorren’s take on its irregular verbs — a common bugbear in many languages — is highly amusing.

Then there are the mutations which cause problems for any learner of the language. Imagine trying to find the word “nghymoedd” (“valleys”) in a dictionary. Would you think of looking under the singular, unmutated “cwm?” If you did, you would have had no need for the dictionary.

Anyone with an interest in the Celto Ligurians will be intrigued to find a minor sub-dialect of Ligurian called Monegasque spoken and taught in the schools of Monaco. No other regional language in France enjoys such status.

But I was surprised that the book has no section on Occitan, the language of the troubadours in the High Middle Ages and the first of the Latin languages to have a standard grammar.

Hungary has a language museum and all that country’s citizens, of elevated spirits linguistically, are expected to make a pilgrimage to it.

But the Icelanders are surely even more hardcore. Others may change and adapt their languages but not the bloody-minded Icelanders. They can and do still read those 12th and 13th-century sagas, which academics continue to insist is written in the “old” Norse language.

We Welsh, too, can read with ease the centuries-old poetry of Dafydd ap Gwilym, a contemporary of Chaucer’s, and some much earlier Welsh works are also quite accessible.

English spelling comes in for some gentle ribbing, not least because of phonetics. I was aware of George Bernard Shaw’s impish respelling of fish as “ghoti” for “fish” but I’d never come across “ghoughphtheightteeau” as a phonetic rendition of “potato” before.

Such amusements, along with the book’s mine of information, make this a great seasonal stocking filler — whether you’re a lingophile or not.

Gwyn Griffiths