Mother Tongue: The Story of the English Language

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The book discusses the Indo-European origins of English, the growing status of English as a global language, the complex etymology of English words, the dialects of English, spelling reform, prescriptive grammar, and other topics including swearing.

Our team is made up of book lovers who are dedicated to sourcing and providing the best books for kids. It is accepted by you that Daunt Books has no control over additional charges in relation to customs clearance. Ever since I learned to read, English has been my favourite language - I took to it like a duck takes to water (at least, I guess they take to it willingly, and that baby ducks are not paddled until their feathers fly by Mamma Duck to make them).Bryson's love for his native English is clear enough; so is his painfully obvious lack of knowledge of any other languages. November 2021: Went ahead and removed my 4 star rating for this book, which I read and reviewed in 2006.

The second is worse; in the chapter on American accents and dialects he starts by agreeing that the USA shows less regional variation than britain and ends suggesting that there is, in fact, one dialect per person.I gave up; there's no point in learning a collection of made up 'facts', however interesting they seem. Bryson eventually disagrees with Burchfield for many of the same reasons, though he was unable to cite the internet as a factor. There is evidence to suggest that some members of Congress aren’t fully sympathetic with the necessity for a commercial nation to be multilingual.

Many of the 'facts' in the book sounded suspicious so I started looking them up elsewhere and found a great many to be wrong. Also, Irish and Welsh orthography is far more internally consistent than is that of English—but Bryson only allows the features of English to be virtues.Overall, this was a pleasant read and is a nice complement to other books that have been written about the English language. Bryson’s clearly lived in England long enough to have imbibed the British combativeness towards the French.

Bill Bryson's classic Mother Tongue is a highly readable and hilarious tale of how English came to be the world's language. His new book The Body: A Guide for Occupants was shortlisted for the Royal Society Science Book Prize and is an international bestseller.I read this book in English and I must admit that although it is very interesting, as a non-English speaker, I was not able to fully appreciate it and understand it.