Are some languages worse than others? The question might sound silly, but in this entertaining exercise in "language tourism" (the book's original Dutch title), the author isn't frightened of making judgments. He thinks lenition – the habit in Welsh of "changing a word's first letter for no apparent reason" – is just "mindboggling", and generally that "Gaelic spelling is flawed … wasteful, arcane and outdated". The "ludicrous" variety of cases in Slovak amounts to "chaos", while Breton's system of naming numbers makes mental arithmetic unnecessarily difficult.

In the author's native Dutch, the gendering of nouns is changing in what he calls "a blatant act of linguistic sexism". (Everything that is not obviously a female living thing is a "he".) Nor will Anglophone readers of this edition feel smug after Dorren's excellent dissection of the illogicality of English, with its 20 different vowel sounds, impossible spelling and idiosyncratic formations. (Very reasonably, Dorren wonders: "Why does English say 'I want you to listen' rather than the more straightforward 'I want that you listen'?")