For word lovers, the summer of 2008 arrives with a refreshing splash of beach books, lakeshore lexicons and poolside paperbacks.

In "The Prodigal Tongue — Dispatches from the Future of English" (Houghton Mifflin, $25), Mark Abley predicts that by 2015, half the world's population will be learning or speaking English. This lively, anecdotal book reports, for instance, that the blend languages Manglish, Konglish and Chinglish now flourish in Malaysia, South Korea and Chin ...

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