Mother Tongue: The Story of the English Language

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It's not at all difficult if you bother to learn the rules, which are far simpler than those of English. No place in the English-speaking world is more breathtakingly replete with dialects than Great Britain.

Of course so much of this discussion is the concern of some to promote the good and proper use of the language, and yet what is fascinating is the shifting ideas through history of what this is, according to Bryson. Bryson's love for his native English is clear enough; so is his painfully obvious lack of knowledge of any other languages.Then he got into some languages I have a smattering of myself – French and German—and I began questioning. We use Google Analytics to see what pages are most visited, and where in the world visitors are visiting from. Bomboras are in the sea, not in rivers, a didgeridoo is not a form of trumpet, and outback is not an Aboriginal word (though bombora is), and we don't normally say "technicolour yawn": it was a joke put forward by Barry Humphries, not common usage. But it's hard to enjoy Bryson's jokes when you have this nagging suspicion that he's bending the truth for the sake of a snappy punchline. I like the book, I just didn't appreciate the superior tone of somebody who is, like the rest of us, inclined to slip from time to time.

the true story of an American lady, newly arrived in London, who opened her front door to find three burly men on the steps informing her that they were her dustmen.We are experiencing delays with deliveries to many countries, but in most cases local services have now resumed. And that's a real shame, because it covers such fascinating topics, and it's so very entertainingly written. You know, there are probably better books on the history of the English language, there are probably deeper books on the nature of linguistics, there are probably a million reasons why you might not read this book - but it tackles something that we all ought to be interested in, our mother tongue, with style, flare and humour. I don’t expect Bill Bryson to be clairvoyant, of course, and a book written in 1991 about the history of language can be forgiven for having predicted neither the rise of the internet nor the scientific breakthroughs that proved that modern humans and Neanderthals interbred. He had me in the first chapter as he proposed that part of the success of the language is the incredible richness of vocabulary (at the time of publication, the OED had 615,000 words), flexibility of usage, and relative simplicity, particularly in comparison to tonal languages of rendering the language in print.

This is most unfortunate, as the topic is fascinating and the writing is witty, though sometimes angry; English is also emotive! If you had to learn English as a second language (and more power to you), then bless your heart for taking on the task.

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. 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). He generally shows a confused understanding of a lot of grammatical concepts/parts of speech, and is inconsistent in his conception of the relationship of spelling to spoken language. Similarly, we have the divergences between New World and Old and some wonder whether American English will become a distinct language.