Pilgrim in the Palace of Words: A Journey Through the 6,000 Languages of Earth

As Glenn Dixon sat defending his Master’s thesis in linguistics to a team of four professors, everything seemed to be going well. He smoothly answered all of their questions on language and grammar. But when Professor Hirabayashi, a Japanese man with a likely personal interest in cross-linguistic misunderstandings, asked him what his work specifically had to do with culture, Dixon was stumped. He hadn’t connected the study of words to the study of culture before. After years of puzzlement, Dixon embarked on a quest to find the answer, travelling across the world to 52 countries, immersing himself in each land he visited.

Beginning in the dusty streets of Jerusalem and ending in his own backyard in the Canadian Rockies, Dixon becomes not just a pilgrim in the Palace of Words, but a student of it. Each individual society has its own sad, beautiful history, and he discovers this by walking the streets where such events unfolded and speaking to the people affected by it. More importantly than talking though, Dixon listens to the people he encounters. Whether it’s his Tibetan guide Tashi or Shakai, the Achuar man he befriends in the Amazon, Dixon knows the tales they tell are just as important as the ones they don’t, the ones told by the weight carried in their eyes, the wrinkles on their faces, and the dirt smeared on their rough hands. His experiences demonstrate that the history of words is as intertwined with the culture of a country as the traditions its people have upheld and the tragedies they have endured. Dixon respectfully breaks down the dirty secrets and complicated histories of each land, and then carefully connects them to the purposeful construction of each language, tracking its evolution, and too often, its destruction through time.

As a professional in the intricate world of words, Dixon is the best guide for this journey through the cultures of the earth. It’s not just his extensive years of study that give him an edge, but his unique ability to connect all of that knowledge to the anecdotes of the people he meets. This book is about more than the facts of history and language; it’s a narrative of the people and a celebration of the symbols and traditions that both separate and unite us.