Gaston Dorren writes popular books on linguistics. In Lingo, he playfully deals with the linguistic landscape of his home continent, Europe. In his award-winning Babel, the world’s 20 most widely spoken languages, including Hindi-Urdu, Bengali, Tamil and Panjabi, are portrayed from surprising angles. Lingo and Babel have been translated into over a dozen European and Asian languages. He has written four more books on linguistics in his native tongue, Dutch. Gaston speaks several European languages, but an attempt to learn Vietnamese failed miserably, as he describes in Babel.