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.

Bryson says in this that he had his mum sending him newspaper cuttings - that is such a lovely image. I read this years ago, tried to read it to the kids at night, but they were just that bit young, and then listened to the talking book recently. If you haven't had the pleasure of this book yet, you should think about it.

Back in the early 2000's one of my wife's friends introduced her to American author Bill Bryson. She read some of his travel books and I began buying some of his other books as well. Since that time I've enjoyed six of his books, my favorites so far being At Home and One Summer: America 1927. I've generally enjoyed every book I've tried. I rank Bryson up there with another non-fiction writer, Simon Wincheser.

The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way was originally published in 1990 and while it wasn't my favorite of his books, I still found it interesting. Basically, Bryson takes a look at the English language; its history, its influences, various dictionaries, spoken English, dialects and even cussing. As always, it was very informative, I especially enjoyed his look at the initial dictionary creators.

What I missed from this book, that I've enjoyed in most of the other Bryson books was the lack of humour. He always seems to take little side trips, providing interesting and often humorous tidbits of info. But in this one it seemed more just a factual journey with lots of time spent sounding out words... e.g. 'In English we have a large number of 'sp-words' pertaining to wetness: spray, spit, sprinkle, splatter, spatter, spill, spigot. And we have a large number of 'fl-words' to do with movement: flail, flapp, flicker, flounce, flee." You can turn to almost any page (yes, I'm exaggerating) and find some such list. It did get tiresome at times, but that's probably just me.

Having listed my little complaint, there were some portions that I found really interesting. My wife is English and we often have had discussions about what she means vs what my Canadian English means. Bryson had a section comparing American English with British English. While Canadian English is sort of a hybrid of both, he provides a list of some words and their meanings in one or the other 'English' and it made me think quite fondly of the discussions my wife and I have had.

'What do you want for pudding, dear? Well, I'd don't want pudding, I want cake for dessert. Pudding is dessert!" That sort of thing. :

rounding down from 3.5

this was written in 1991 & he could honestly write a whole new book with how much language has changed because of the internet. some of the reviews suggest that some statements in this book are wrong. dunno!

the problem with the audiobook is that 25% of it is words being spelled at you & i couldn’t keep up, but on the other hand i was able to hear the strange pronunciations he talked about

What a hilarious, fascinating, and educational look at our wacky, wonderful, and WAY complicated language. If English is your mother tongue, this book will amaze and amuse you with interesting tidbits about just how our language evolved into the wonder it is. If you had to learn English as a second language (and more power to you), then bless your heart for taking on the task. You will read this book, and say YES, absolutely, I always wondered..., etc. Bill Bryson turns his sharp-eyes to "The Mother Tongue" and takes us all on a fabulous journey through and overview of the intricacies of human language. You will laugh, smile, and learn a few things while you're at it!!!

Review in English | Reseña en español

I love books about the history of languages and this was not the exception. Bryson does a really good job in taking us through the origin of the English language, its many influences and changes, and its growth. Overall, I think this is a very entertaining account of English, with lots of interesting details and how it has become one of the most important languages worldwide. Because, whether we like it or not, English is a universal language because with all its complexities, it is relatively easy to learn and has evolved in such a way that has dropped a lot of the grammatical rules that make other languages very complex -German or Japanese, to name a few.

I liked this book because I love English, and as a non-native speaker, I’ve learned to really appreciate the virtues of this language and its kindness for those of us who do not have it as a mother tongue. I will always be surprised on how easy it is to write something quite poetic in English and not sound ‘cheesy’, because in Spanish it is so hard to achieve this.

While Bryson book is a bit outdated -this was written in the early 90s- his research is outstanding and he manages to provide a lot of information in a very accesible manner, enabling us to learn from very interesting, funny facts -for example, the origin of the ‘British accent’ which was made up by upper classes to differentiate themselves from the lower classes around the 18th century.

I enjoyed this book throughly and laughed a couple of times while listening to it. I particularly liked the last part where Bryson explores the differences between American and British English and the ‘rivalry’ from its speakers. I guess this is something that is familiar to those of us who were born in former colonies -either from the UK, Spain or France, to name a few- and that not withstanding the centuries after our independence, we still receive comments from the Motherland in the sense that we don’t speak the correct form of the language, implying we speak an ‘impure’ form. Bryson points out how the US accent and vocabulary have been seen as ‘inferior English’. Even in non speaking English countries, we tend to idolize the British accent as more ‘sophisticated’ -well at least I have done it. However, I have come to realize how silly this is -like saying Spanish from Spain is better than the one spoken in Mexico, or Colombia, or Chile, something with which I obviously do not agree.

Truth is, every language is a living thing and as such, it evolves, changes and grows, depending on the time, the historical context, and people. Languages are not static and therefore, it is a snob thing to believe a particular accent or form of the language is the correct one. All forms of language are important and reflect the way of living, thoughts and beliefs of a group of people and for that reason alone, we should not criticize or thing one form is better than the other. In this sense, English has been a very open language (unlike Spanish) accepting words from other languages, being flexible and taking on influences to keep expanding. It has done so to such an extend that there is not Language Academy for English.

Definitely worth a read.
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Disfruto mucho los libros que tratan sobre la historia de los idiomas y este no fue la excepción. Bryson hace un muy buen trabajo relatando el origen del inglés, sus muchas influencias y su crecimiento a través de los siglos así como sus cambios. En resumen, me parece que este libro es un recuento entretenido de la historia de la lengua inglesa, con muchos detalles interesantes y su evolución hasta convertirse en uno de los idiomas más importantes a nivel mundial. Porque, nos guste o no, la realidad es que el inglés es un idioma universal por que, con todas sus complejidades, es relativamente fácil de aprender y ha evolucionado de tal forma que ha eliminado muchas de las reglas gramaticales que hacen a otras lenguas muy complejas -como el alemán o japonés, por mencionar algunas.

Me gustó este libro porque, desde siempre, me ha fascinado el inglés y, al no ser mi lengua materna, realmente he aprendido a apreciar las bondades de esta lengua, y las facilidades que nos da a aquellos que la aprendemos como segundo idioma. Por ejemplo, nunca dejará de sorprenderme qué fácil es escribir algo sumamente poético en inglés y no sonar ‘cursi’, porque en español vaya que es difícil lograrlo.

Cabe destacar que el libro está algo desactualizado -fue escrito a principios de los noventas, pero la investigación es bastante sólida y brinda mucha información de forma accesible lo cual permite aprender hechos y datos interesantes, incluso divertidos. Por ejemplo, en una parte nos cuenta sobre el origen del ‘acento inglés’ que fue de alguna manera inventado por las clases altas de Inglaterra alrededor del siglo XVIII para diferenciarse de las clases bajas.

De esta forma, me pareció una lectura muy amena y me reí un par de veces mientras lo escuchaba. También me gustó mucho la última parte en donde Bryson explora las diferencias entre el inglés de Estados Unidos y el de Gran Bretaña y la ‘rivalidad’ que ha existido entre sus hablantes. Esta situación es familiar para aquellos de nosotros que nacimos en ex colonias, ya sea de Inglaterra, España o Francia, por nombrar algunas, y que, al parecer, a pesar que han pasado siglos desde la independencia, aun es frecuente escuchar desde la Madre Patria respectiva, comentarios de que no hablamos la ‘forma correcta’ del idioma, sugiriendo que hablamos una forma ‘impura’. Bryson señala cómo el acento de Estados Unidos y su vocabulario son vistos como un inglés inferior.

Incluso en los países que no somos de habla inglesa, hemos tendido a idealizar el ‘acento inglés’, es decir, el británico, viéndolo como algo mas sofisticado. Bueno, por lo menos es algo que yo he hecho. Sin embargo, me he dado cuenta que esto es algo realmente tonto, como decir que el español de España es mejor que el que se habla en México, Colombia o Chile, lo cual es falso, discriminatorio y algo en lo que no creo.

La cuestión es que, en nuestros arranques puristas sobre la lengua, solemos olvidar que todos los idiomas son entes vivos y como tal, evolucionan, cambian y crecen, dependiendo del periodo histórico, el contexto social y la gente. Las lenguas no son estáticas y creo que es algo snob creer que un acento en particular o forma del idioma es la correcta y mejor que otra. Todas las formas del idioma son importantes y reflejan una forma de vivir, creencias y pensamientos de una población y por esa única razón, no debemos criticar ni pensar qué hay una correcta forma de hablar un idioma. En este sentido, también creo que el inglés es mucho más flexible que el español en cuanto a aceptar nuevos términos, nuevas expresiones e influencias. Basta decir que ni siquiera cuentan con una Real Academia de la Lengua.

Una lectura muy recomendable.

I'd had great hopes for this book, yet I never got beyond the first chapter simply because of the hideously large number of factual errors popping up on each page. The one thing this book is good at is - sadly - the perpetuation of myths, false beliefs and urban legends among the general public. As a fledgeling linguist I would give it a minus 1 rating if I could.

I'm a writer, and I don't hold with slam-dunking other writers in print, because they can't reply. In a more open medium like this, I am prepared to serve Bryson as he serves others, but with a little less barren pedantry.

It's an excellent book, but like so many foreigners, Bryson thinks a quick tour makes him an expert on all things Australian. WRONG!!

We don't say cookie, we say biscuit. Getting that wrong is clumsy.

We don't normally say "labor", we call it labour. The sole exception is in the name of the Australian Labor Party, which adopted that spelling in the 19th century.

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.

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.

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.

Why was this book even published? There are so many errors, inaccuracies, misconceptions, misunderstandings and whatnot, I don't even know where to begin. (And I'm not even a linguist.)
All of this makes me question all the other "facts" I don't know anything about, I simply don't know if I've learned more about them from reading this book.

The Acknowledgements of the book mentions several people, but I hope for their sake that he didn't follow their advice. Otherwise they should receive a dishonorable mention and be out of work.

I give it one star because Bill Bryson writes well.



Review part I: Bringing science to the people, Bill Bryson style, is always funny and edcuational. However, this book is old, (it was written before the Wall came down, which is evident in the mentioning of the number of citizens of the Soviet Union who don't speak Russian) and a lot has happened in the lingustic field since then. So I'm not sure the information is always correct. Until I find out, I will simply enjoy the book as is :-)

One curious thing: Norwegians supposedly "talk about departing like an Englishman" (p7) Eh, really? Never heard of that. Googling it, I find only quotes from this book.

Update: Not sure I'll finish this book. I was worried it'd be outdated, but that's only part of the problem. There are so many inaccuracies, facts that are not facts at all and some Bryson attitude issues.
I've mentioned the Norwegian example above and other Goodreads reviews mentions that, according to this book, mordern Finnish has no swear words (!) and Bryson's understanding of (to him) foreign languages like Japanese and German leads to wrong or not quite accurate conclusions. Also quotes like "As of 1989, the Basque separatist organization ETA ... had committed 672 murders in the name of linguistic and cultural independence" (p35) is rather particular, to say the least.
His rant about funny Welsh spelling and pronounciation is silly. (p36) In some languages, like Spanish, spelling and pronounciation are almost the same, in other languages, like Danish and apparantly Welsh, they are not. Also, the pronounciation of a specific language is difficult or easy according to your own mother tongue. German to me is easy, Japanese is difficult. A book like this should acknowledge these things.

I'm normally a big fan of Bill Bryson; and like his other books, this one is amusing to read. But I have rarely come across a non-fiction book with so many factual errors. Embarrassingly many.

Among many other things, Bryson claims that

* Almost everyone agrees that English possesses more sounds than almost any other language. (He goes on to say that English has about 44 distinct sounds. Compare that to the 141 sounds of the Taa language of Botswana.)

* Esperanto has no definite article. (It does have a definite article, but lacks an indefinite article.)

* The vowel sound in her, sir, blur is unique to English. (It is not.)

* J.R.R. Tolkien wrote the Hobbit trilogy. (No, he wrote The Hobbit and The Lord of The Rings trilogy.)

* Only in English can you make compounds that allow you to distinguish between "boathouse" and "houseboat". (You can also do this in Danish and, I presume, most other Germanic languages.)

...and so on, and so on.

The number of egregious errors means that as a source of information the book is virtually useless. When you come across an interesting piece of information, you feel obliged to ask yourself, "Is this information also a falsehood?"

Lots of interesting, amusing and charming histories of the "English" language (esp. its many mutations and assimilations). I especially enjoy the tidbits on British culture--the quirkiness of pronunciations and spellings, the long-winded names of nobility, and the imaginative names for pubs and towns! While I know some question the academic merit of this book, others promote it--I'm not a linguist, so I simply find it entertaining!

This was a possible book club pick for me - glad I read it first!

First written in 1990, this book has not aged well. There are numerous errors in facts (such as saying that the Finns don't have swear words - to which I say Perkele!), and outdated terms (Bryson calls one coworker an 'oriental'). A further 30 years of internet access would drastically change much of this book. Bryson also at one point waves off the thought that computers would ever make good translators.

My main issue with the book is Bryson never really stops to discuss why English is so global - the influence of British and the American Empires. From the book, you could assume everyone seems to use English just because it's such a great language. It's really apparent in his discussions on Irish and Welsh in particular. After talking about the language's decline following centuries of colonization he utters this:

“We, naturally, lament the decline of these languages, but it is not, all together, an undiluted tragedy. Consider the loss to English literature if Joyce, Shaw, Swift, Yeats, Wylde, Sing, Ian, and Ireland’s other literary masters had written in, what is inescapably, a fringe language. Their works would be as little known to us as those of the poets of Iceland or Norway, and that would be a tragedy indeed. No country has given the world more incomparable literature per head of population than Ireland, and for that reason alone we might be excused a small, selfish, celebration that English was the language of her greatest writers.”

It sure would be a tragedy if all these literary figures wrote in the language of their ancestors. We'd almost have to learn another language! Why, no one has ever read a book in Icelandic or Norwegian. Who knows, maybe Irish wouldn't have been an inescapably fringe language if it had literary greats.


The portions about the history of the English language were interesting, but often Bryson would contrast with other languages I doubt he had a real grasp of.

Throughout the book, a quote from Eamon de Valera kept coming to mind. I first heard it as I went off to college and it has been a reason why I am learning Irish myself, despite being the only one I know who is.


"...[Irish] is for us what no other language can be. It is our very own... It is more than a symbol, it is an essential part of our nationhood. It has been moulded by the thought of a hundred generations of our forebears. In it is stored the accumulated experience of a people... A vessel for three thousand years of our history, the language is for us precious beyond measure... To part with it would be to abandon a great part of ourselves, to loose the key to our past, to cut away the roots from the tree. With the language gone we could never again aspire to being more than half a nation..."

-Extract from Eamon de Valera's Speech to the Nation, broadcast on Radio Éireann, March 17th, 1943.

Bryson lifts up the deep and rich history and evolution of English, but brushes aside the languages that have been suppressed by English speakers, while only bemoaning that had the natives spoken their own languages, well then we'd have to put in effort to read their literature.

In the 30 years since this book was written, so many have begun to wrench the languages of their ancestors back from colonial oppression. You can learn Navajo and Hawaiian on your phones, Maori is growing as a spoken language, Ireland and Wales desperately try to save their languages through government funding.

I think language is beautiful, something is certainly lost when a language dies, and English has more than a few bodies in the language's closet.

Bryson writes from a very specific kind of perspective, one that is not quite self-aware of his privilege as a white man out in the world. I love books on linguistics, etymology, and language, but this one felt so problematic. His humor troubled me in this book because it felt clouded by inherent racism. I recognize this book was originally published in 1991, but...

"...we forget just how easily people forsake their tongues—as the Celts did in Spain and France, as the Vikings did in Normandy, and as the Italians, Poles, Africans, Russians, and countless others all did in America." Forsake them? I feel like that implies that it was voluntary.

"We in the English-speaking world are actually sometimes better at looking after our borrowed words than the parents were."

He also refers to the "n word" as an "insulting term" as opposed to a racial epithet.

"...the 'l' sound that Orientals find so deeply impossible." WTF, really? Orientals?

"Among the new words the Australians devised, many of them borrowed from the aborigines..." You mean appropriated.

"Those captured as slaves suffered not only the tragedy of having their lives irretrievably disrupted..." Irretrievably disrupted is what you say when you're talking about adopting a pet, not about the literal capture and ownership of PEOPLE.

"A second and rather harsher problem is deciding whether a person speaks English or simply thinks he speaks it."