While a Tasting Note in each chapter lists some of that region’s more popular beverages, the book’s real fascination lies in the history and intricacy of language. The infatuation started early, recounts Cook, pointing out that Tolkien had much to do with it. “He probably shoulders a lot of the blame for my early language itch. Lots of people assume Tolkien made up the Middle Earth cultures and names out of thin air, but in fact, he mined heaps of foreign literature to get all of that: Finnish, Old English, Norse. I remember reading the Poetic Edda—an 11th century collection of Old Norse mythological poems—and coming across the names of all the dwarves that appeared in The Hobbit. That blew my mind,” he says. He had also attempted learning foreign languages like Japanese, at one point even looking for a foreign culture to model his own fabricated fantasy universe on. Then, at 14, he had chanced upon Anthony Burgess’s experiments with language in A Clockwork Orange. “Burgess wrote the whole book in this euphonious Anglo-Russian slang which, even if you didn’t speak a word of Russian, you could still understand. He could speak six languages fluently, but Russian wasn’t one of them. He’d just been interested in how it sounded, and interest had produced the novel. I’d never seen anyone play games with language like that before. It looked like fun. I wanted to play too,” says Cook, tracing the beginnings of a passion that has evidently served him well.

Brandon Cook

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Cheers! was four years in the making, a period during which Cook consulted language indexes and interviewed people, occasionally surprised by the enthusiasm that complete strangers showed for the project. Keeping a global readership in mind, he contacted a variety of people through the language learning platform italki, booked lessons with instructors, got language professors to confirm information, and had individual articles proofread by native speakers. His travels too, he says, have helped him collect toasts, the way he once collected books, swords and shot glasses. Toasts are great conversation starters, he believes, potential gateways to larger discussions around history, tradition and culture.

Among some of the most intriguing finds Cook made during his research for the book was how far languages had marched. He mentions discovering the Persian influence in Tajikistan, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and India’s linguistic diversity among other things, and the ancient trade routes and long histories of migration, displacement, and the rise and fall of empires that they directed him towards. For the author, “Following these epic narratives in the residues preserved in languages and where they’re spoken—that was a real adventure”.