I know exactly a little bit about English, and a little bit less about linguistics in general. Studied a few foreign languages, took a linguistics class or two in college. I'm what you might call a big fan of language. A dabbler. Certainly not an expert. But boy, did I find this book infuriating.

My problem with this book is that it gets so much right, and so much wrong. The example that really set me off was his treatment of the Welsh language. To Bryson, Welsh is "as unpronounceable as it looks", and Welsh pronunciations "rarely bear much relation to their spellings." He then spouts off with a series of jokes that are so ethnocentric and condescending that, if you took them at face value, you couldn't help but feel sorry for the poor backward speakers of silly old Welsh.

The problem is, he's completely wrong. I happened to study the phonology and orthography of Welsh for about a week in that freshman linguistics class (I know, that makes me a big authority, right?) but in that week I learned something Bryson apparently never bothered to look up: Welsh orthography is remarkably regular, about as regular as Spanish. It's not at all difficult if you bother to learn the rules, which are far simpler than those of English. (The fact that I learned them in one week, and remember them decades later, should be some indication of how easy they are.) The phoneme represented by the double-l is called a lateral fricative, and yes, it's hard to pronounce if you don't speak Welsh, but that does not mean it's sometimes pronounced "kl" and other times "thl" as Bryson suggests. It is always pronounced just like it's spelled. But Bryson's Anglo-American tin ear failed to pick that up, and he took his ignorance and turned it into a cheap joke at another culture's expense.

Knowing that he got Welsh so wrong made me doubt all of the rest of the information in the book. And that's a real shame, because it covers such fascinating topics, and it's so very entertainingly written. 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.

n  “To be fair, English is full of booby traps for the unwary foreigner. Any language where the unassuming word fly signifies an annoying insect, a means of travel, and a critical part of a gentleman’s apparel is clearly asking to be mangled.”n

Say what you want, Bill Bryson, but English is actually ridiculously easy. Not that I’m perfect in it, but still, compared to other languages, it’s a piece of cake. Even with those pesky indefinite and definite articles — I’ll still take those over conjugations and declensions and all that other stuff English seems to have just shrugged off to everyone’s benefit. The spelling — well, if seven-year-old Nataliya was able to get past the sheer mortification of spelling “cat” as “kat” in her first English class in school, so can everyone else.

n  “Language, never forget, is more fashion than science, and matters of usage, spelling, and pronunciation tend to wander around like hemlines.”n

Languages evolve naturally, sometimes slowly and sometimes unexpectedly fast, with everything contributing to that, even misspellings and misunderstandings. Spelling can follow pronunciation, but then we also have pronunciation change due to new spelling fads (like adding “t” to “often” and “b” to “debt”). The origins of English are basically a mishmash of so many influences, and I never get tired of all the anecdotes and Bryson-style tangents.

What I love is that Bryson is not a self-appointed grammarian and is quite clear about his views on the completely arbitrary grammar conventions that have no basis whatsoever other than some stuffy pedant deciding on a way to separate the elite from the plebs. After all, n  “Considerations of what makes for good English or bad English are to an uncomfortably large extent matters of prejudice and conditioning.”n

n  “So if there are no officially appointed guardians for the English language, who sets down all those rules that we all know about from childhood—the idea that we must never end a sentence with a preposition or begin one with a conjunction, that we must use each other for two things and one another for more than two, and that we must never use hopefully in an absolute sense, such as “Hopefully it will not rain tomorrow”? The answer, surprisingly often, is that no one does, that when you look into the background of these “rules” there is often little basis for them.”n

And so I will happily go on starting my sentences with “And…” and ending them with prepositions while splitting every infinitive I can possibly find.

n  “I can think of two very good reasons for not splitting an infinitive.
1. Because you feel that the rules of English ought to conform to the grammatical precepts of a language that died a thousand years ago.
2. Because you wish to cling to a pointless affectation of usage that is without the support of any recognized authority of the last 200 years, even at the cost of composing sentences that are ambiguous, inelegant, and patently contorted.”n

n  
Image borrowed from The Jenkins comic strip here: https://thejenkinscomic.wordpress.com.... n

I do adore reading about British and American English differences — hey, our linguistic peculiarities here in the US are because we held on to saying things like “gotten” that the Brits have since forgotten. We are charming this way, I suppose. (And those poor 18th century public US figures had to dejectedly apologize to those Brits about Americanisms. Hey, without us you’d still be using “gyratory circuses” instead of roundabouts. But sadly, despite what we’d love to think, Shakespeare - or perhaps Shakspere - did not sound like an Appalachian farmer).

n  “Sometimes these differences in meaning take on a kind of bewildering circularity. A tramp in Britain is a bum in America, while a bum in Britain is a fanny in America, while a fanny in Britain is—well, we’ve covered that. To a foreigner it must seem sometimes as if we are being intentionally contrary.”
————

Arguably America’s single greatest gift to international discourse, O.K. is the most grammatically versatile of words, able to serve as an adjective (“Lunch was O.K.”), verb (“Can you O.K. this for me?”), noun (“I need your O.K. on this”), interjection (“O.K., I hear you”), and adverb (“We did O.K.”). It can carry shades of meaning that range from casual assent (“Shall we go?” “O.K.”), to great enthusiasm (“O.K.!”), to lukewarm endorsement (“The party was O.K.”), to a more or less meaningless filler of space (“O.K., can I have your attention please?”). n

Bill Bryson is funny and very enthusiastic, sometimes overwhelmingly so, but it’s very endearing. This book is not a scholarly work by any means but rather a bunch of anecdotes told in such a manner that you just can’t stop reading (or listening on a few long hikes in my case). I’m a sucker for such enthusiastic sincere humor, so it was right up my alley. And even though some things are clearly a bit dated in information and attitudes (the book was published in 1990), it didn't spoil the experience for me.

n   “Perhaps for our last words on the subject of usage we should turn to the last words of the venerable French grammarian Dominique Bonhours, who proved on his deathbed that a grammarian’s work is never done when he turned to those gathered loyally around him and whispered: “I am about to—or I am going to—die; either expression is used.”n

For a more scholarly approach I do highly advise reading David Crystal’s books, which I do plan to reread, actually, but for a fun diversion for a few hours Bryson is good.

3.5 stars.

The Mother Tongue is the story of the evolution of the English language, from its humble beginnings as a Germanic tongue to what it has evolved into over the centuries.

So, Bill Bryson + cheap equals insta-buy for me, apparently. Too bad even Bill Bryson couldn't make this terribly entertaining.

I have a long history as "the obscure facts guy" at social gatherings, at least, I did when people still invited me to such things. However, even I had trouble sticking with this one at times.

Old Bill is in fine form, cracking wise and still being informative at every opportunity. He didn't get much in the way of interesting material to work with in this case.

The book was not without its moments, however. I did enjoy the chapter on swearing, as well as numerous tidbits, or titbits, as they were called in a less prudish era, that peppered the other chapters. Too bad the gems were scarce and some of the reading resembled the back-breaking labor involved in mining.

While I found the book informative and mildly amusing, at the end of the day, it's still a book about the history of words. Even one of the funnier travel writers alive can't make chicken salad from chicken feathers in this case. 2.5 out of 5.

The one thing that bothered me the most about this book was a huge error it had on swearwords, in reference to my mother tongue Finnish:

(p. 210, Ch. Swearing, in my Penguin paperback:) “Some cultures don’t swear at all. (…) The Finns, lacking the sort of words you need to describe your feelings when you stub your toe getting up to answer a phone at 2.00 a.m., rather oddly adopted the word “ravintolassa.” It means ‘in the restaurant.’"

I mean, what the hell?! We Finns have probably the world's most colourful collection of swearwords. Someone pulled old Bill's leg, and did it properly too. That casts doubt on all he has written, really. And nobody says "ravintolassa" unless they do in fact mean "in the restaurant."

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). This was the cause of the eternal chagrin of my mother who, being a staunch nationalist, wanted me to prefer Hindi over English. She recited to me a famous couplet in Malayalam, which said:

"Other languages are merely nannies;
For man, the native tongue is the mother."

I replied that in that case, Malayalam is my mother, and both Hindi and English are nannies. And I just happened to prefer my English nanny over my native one. She had no answer to that!

Well, I am glad I stuck to English over Hindi, because this is one crazy nanny - totally idiosyncratic and eccentric, just like me. And to tell you how eccentric, who better than Bill Bryson?

If you approach this book hoping for a scholarly analysis of the English language, you are going to be sorely disappointed. For that don't come to old Bill. What he does is to throw out titbits (or tidbits in the US, as they the consider the former spelling risque - so Bryson tells me) of information, some useful, some useless, some bizarre: but all fascinating. One thing you can be sure of - you won't be disappointed.

This book is a linguistic, historical and geographical romp through English wherein Bill tackles such varied subjects as

1. The origin and spread of English
2. The evolution of words
3. Pronunciation
4. Spelling
5. The varieties of English, both inside the UK and outside
6. Dictionaries and their producers
7. Where names come from
8. Profanity
9. Wordplay

... and much more.

There is not a single boring sentence. You are guaranteed to be snickering throughout.

I managed perhaps thirty pages of this and gave up. I hadn't read a Bryson book before; it's unlikely I shall ever attempt another.

Many of the 'facts' in the book sounded suspicious so I started looking them up elsewhere and found a great many to be wrong. I looked at the one- and two-star reviews on Amazon and found that many other people had found this too. Some people giving favourable reviews said that they weren't put off by it—it had been an entertaining read anyway.

I gave up; there's no point in learning a collection of made up 'facts', however interesting they seem.

The only good thing I can say about this book is that it fired in me a greater interest in the subject, for which I turned to more accurate books by people who actually know their subject. I also learnt to be more careful of what I read, and I steer well clear of Mr Bryson's works.

Please be aware that this comment is from a student and will be biased in a certain way

I definitely learned a lot from the mother tongue. It contained controversial topics and perspectives toward the English Language that most people have never thought about before. It is indeed interesting. However, it is only good for those who want to study the English Language. Bryson contained a lot of examples. But to be honest, most people can only relate themselves to less than one-third of the examples. The examples are great but it is annoying and boring to people who doesn't want to study the English Language because of the massive amount of them. But if you want to study the English Language, I'll recommend this book for knowledge. If you're only reading it for fun, be ready for some tormenting during the process of reading.

English is one crazy language. 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). It is similar with how history's made, there were wars, migrations, proliferation of mass media, the making of dictionaries, public figures making their own linguistic marks (and complete fools of themselves), class and regional divisions, and so on and so forth.

Bryson is a funny guy. I think I have read at least two of his works previously and he never disappoints in making me chuckled or even roaring with laughter. True, there was a stultifying effect of him becoming too enthusiastic with his many, many examples, when he already made his points. That's my biggest gripe from reading this novel.

Nevertheless, the book itself is a bundle of joy of finding invariably humorous take on how word changed - even corrupted - over the course of time. It is amusing to know people made mistakes and those mistakes held on until today.

It made me wonder, though, since English is very much a dynamic language co-created together by the whole world depending on the generation, how much it will change in the next 100 years? We know that the Oxford Dictionary added "twerk", "derp" and "selfie" back in 2013 (which caused quite a bit of uproar), and in June 2017 alone, there are at least 100 new words. With the growing invasion of foreign and urbandictionary.com words, would English become the One True Lingua Franca?

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. English book fairs are always loaded with people (and bloody, thieving online shops). I just hope the rest of the country can keep up with developing their skill. But I also hope that these fluent young speakers do not forget their own language.

This rating is for the audiobook only.

I love Bryson. He's one of my favorite nonfiction writers. I think he's funny and informative, and I've enjoyed every other book of his I've read. But this makes an awful audiobook. The narrator has to spell so many words out that it's virtually nonsensical. And the book was written in 1990 originally and hasn't withstood the test of time. On top of that, Bryson made some pretty clear mistakes when talking about languages he's unfamiliar with (I noticed Japanese in particular) that were fairly annoying.

I might recommend this book in physical form but would certainly avoid the audiobook.

For better or for worse, English became a global language, the language of economics, science, politics at international level, and, even, pop music! For better or for worse, English also has permeated many other languages (e.g. French, that 'le franglais' is often accused of invading...). Of course, Bill Bryson offers here a few reasons to explain such fact; for example, a simple grammar that makes it very flexible and versatile (English isn't my native language, but I agree on that one). He also reminds us how such polemics of an all invading English is not without creating tensions. Such discussions, though, are not his main concerns in here.

'Mother Tongue' retells in fact the history of a language, the bastard daughter born from an orgy of European languages (more than 10,000 of its words alone are French in origin...) and that Imperial endeavours (from the Americas to Australia) will spread across the globe with surprising consequences. Not only Englishes will develop, but these Englishes will also come back to influence the original one (from England, then) with funny twists... Since the history of a language goes hand in hand with that of its speakers, there has been indeed some unforeseen collusions...

It's a simple read, straightforward, that only the anecdotic style of the author renders slightly annoying at time. The reliability of his sources (if quoted at all!) is often slim, and there are even a few mistakes here and there. Nevertheless, it's a great book to browse over just to get a rough gist of a topic! It's just nothing more than that. Well, at least it's entertaining...

I might be a bit biased on this one because I love books about language, language development, and language evolution. However it was chock-full (and likely had the story behind and the source of this phrase) of great details and tidbits (previously the more offensive titbits) related to everything from the source of words, to spellings, and pronunciations. Fascinating how our language has changed through the years into what we see today. Presents the pros and cons of the language; discusses the aspects that have been simplified and those that have been left obscure and confusing. Loved it.

DNF. I found this too boring to spend anymore time on. If you love linguistics, give it a shot.