Mother Tongue: The Story of the English Language

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As a person who is not a native speaker, this book is very insightful in terms of how the most globalized language developed (and is still developing). At this point, I decided I’d read some reviews to see if anyone who knows more than I do felt the same way. The Eskimos, as is well known, have fifty words for types of snow—though curiously no word for just plain snow.

His discussion of pronunciation and particularly the shifts in vowel sounds was fascinating, For example house was once pronounced hoose. Can't blame a book for being out of date, so it's actually somewhat amusing to see how things can change so much in just a few decades. Bryson's concluding chapters explore the origins of proper names, our propensity for wordplay, and the history of what are now considered vulgarities (although I think since Bryson wrote, what was censored in from public media in my youth is becoming more and more common). As for Indonesia, English speakers should feel more at home here (at least in the urban areas) in the next decade or more, with all these millennials/gen-zs at the malls talking rather fluent English for their daily conversation.I could go on and demolish his assertions about the Australian accents (he seems to think that any one of us speaks one, only) and if somebody is going to be arch about other people's proofing, page 139, the first page of chapter 10 needs to be looked at HARD. Consider the loss to English literature, if Joyce, Shaw, Swift, Yeats, Wilde, and Ireland's other literary masters have written in what inescapably a fringe language, their work will be as little known to us as those poets in Iceland or Norway, and that would be a tragedy indeed. Mother Tongue is a series of essays on the origins of human language, with plenty of interesting scientific insights, then to the messy origins of English amid the various waves of invasions of the original Celtic peoples of Britain by Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Normans, Scandinavians (Vikings), and so forth, to its growing status as a global language. So that's when the whole book fell apart for me, because if he couldn't get this part right, what other things might he have been wrong about?

That’s some magic trick, to have a land which is both entirely uninhabited when the white folks show up but which also has indigenous people living there to just offer up words for colonisers to “borrow”! I know and I do even realise that Bill Bryson is considered an entertaining author and that he also seems to be much loved and appreciated by many. This is most unfortunate, as the topic is fascinating and the writing is witty, though sometimes angry; English is also emotive!In the next 700 years, its meaning has changed so many times that it is impossible to tell what sense Jane Austen intended when she wrote to a friend: "You scold me so much in a nice long letter which I have received from you. And that's a real shame, because it covers such fascinating topics, and it's so very entertainingly written.

JK Rowling aside, with communication technology becoming smaller, cheaper, and more powerful, I think we'll still be able to communicate two hundred years down the line. Registered office address: Unit 34 Vulcan House Business Centre, Vulcan Road, Leicester, Leicestershire, LE5 3EF.I think what bothers me most is the very thinly veiled "linguo"centrism that turns it from a piece of enthusiastic writing about the English language into a poorly-argued case for why English is better than every other language on the planet.