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The Power Of Babel
  • Published: 30 April 2011
  • ISBN: 9781446472408
  • Imprint: Cornerstone Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 336
Categories:

The Power Of Babel

A Natural History of Language

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A wonderful guided tour of language, as sharp and thought-provoking as Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct and as entertaining and Bill Bryson's Mother Tongue.

There can be few subjects of such widespread interest and fascination to anyone who reads as the strange ways of languages. In this wonderfully entertaining and fascinating book, John McWhorter introduces us to 'the natural history of language': from Russonorsk, a creole of Russian and Norwegian once spoken by trading fur trappers to an Australian Aboriginal language which only has three verbs. Witty, brilliant and authoritative, this book is a must for anyone who is interested in language, as sheerly enjoyable as non-fiction gets.
  • Published: 30 April 2011
  • ISBN: 9781446472408
  • Imprint: Cornerstone Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 336
Categories:

About the author

John McWhorter

John H. McWhorter teaches linguistics, American studies, and music history at Columbia University. He is the host of the podcast Lexicon Valley and writes a weekly column for The New York Times. McWhorter is the author of twenty-three books, including Nine Nasty Words, Woke Racism, The Power of Babel, and Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue.
portrait photo of John McWhorter

Also by John McWhorter

Nine Nasty Words
Doing Our Own Thing
See all

Praise for The Power Of Babel

'McWhorter relishes the world of pidgins, Creoles, dialects and slang... His enthusiasm is infectious'

Daily Telegraph

'A frisky observer of the linguistic scene'

Keith Waterhouse in the Daily Mail

'The breathless tour of linguistic oddities from around the globe has its own empirical delight... McWhorter is a kind of linguistic David Attenborough... The fascination is in his detail, the sheer case-by-case weirdness of languages'

Guardian