Florian Coulmas is Senior Professor of the Faculty of Social Sciences at Duisburg-Essen University. From 2004 to 2014, he served as director of the German Institute for Japanese Studies, Tokyo, and he has held appointments at Georgetown University, Washington D.C., the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, Tokyo, and Chuo University, Tokyo. He is the author of Writing and Society (CUP, 2014) and editor of Language Regimes in Transformation (Mouton de Gruyter, 2007) and The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Writing Systems (Blackwell, 1999). He is also Associate Editor of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language.

• Preface ; Introduction: The Politics of Language ; 1. Alcuin of York ; 2. Sibawayhi ; 3. Dante Alighieri ; 4. King Sejong the Great ; 5. Elio Antonio de Nebrija ; 6. Cardinal Richelieu ; 7. Catherine the Great ; 8. Adamantios Korais ; 9. Noah Webster ; 10. Jacob Grimm ; 11. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda ; 12. Ludovik Lazarus Zamenhof ; 13. Ueda Kazutoshi ; 14. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin ; 15. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk ; 16. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi ; 17. Zhou Enlai ; 18. Pope Paul VI ; 19. Sutan Takdir Alisjahbana ; 20. Leopold Sedar Senghor ; Lessons learnt ; Bibliography ; Index

The writing is elegant with some wisely chosen droplets of humor. One can read the book cover to cover, but those interested in particular topics --e.g., Esperanto, the revival of modern Hebrew, Bahasa Indonesia -- can read select chapters. However approached, the book is a delightful read.