This book is riddled with inaccuracies and all the Anglo-centric condescension you’d expect from an American-British man writing in 1990. Accordingly, Bryson remains casually racist throughout the book, in a way that gets harder to ignore from chapter to chapter. I know he didn’t have the internet, but didn’t we have fact-checkers back then? It seems like someone, at least, should have made Bryson validate some of his assertions. As it is, no one did, and so the book is mildly entertaining but lost my trust early on. Still, some of it is interesting and amusing, if it’s true, so I hold it at two stars.

A fun book about the history of English. Bryson's wit and style are as good as ever, and I laughed out loud in places. Four stars because it is unnecessarily crude in places (including a whole chapter on swearing).

1★ (DNF)
I thought this would be fun. I love words and languages and have a passing interest in linguistics. I started this with enthusiasm and was enjoying his breezy style until it occurred to me that a lot of what he was saying seemed to be anecdotal. You know, limited or no research.

Then I thought, well, it was written more than 25 years ago, so things that sounded like old stories to me may have been new stories then – like this one:

n  “The Eskimos, as is well known, have fifty words for types of snow—though curiously no word for just plain snow. To them there is crunchy snow, soft snow, fresh snow, and old snow, but no word that just means snow.” n

There’s a wealth of articles about this half-truth (I’m being generous). Here’s one http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca...

So how many grains of salt would I need to swallow the declaration that immediately followed? An unhealthy amount, I’m sure.

n  “The Italians, as we might expect, have over 500 names for different types of macaroni.”n

He goes on to say these include n  “spaghettin and n  vermicelli.”n He obviously means types of pasta.

Then he got into some languages I have a smattering of myself – French and German—and I began questioning. Some of it just sounded wrong, like the quote from an article that says most speakers of other languages aren’t aware there is such a thing as a thesaurus.

At this point, I decided I’d read some reviews to see if anyone who knows more than I do felt the same way. Sadly, there are a lot. You can check the low-rating reviews on Amazon that actually discuss the many factual errors.

I stopped reading, thinking I might accidentally absorb some of the "facts" and perpetuate them myself!

How disappointing. One star for the writing.

When it comes to Bill Bryson, I tend to prefer his travelogues. Although “The Mother Tongue” is not a travelogue, I enjoyed it greatly. It’s a fascinating and, as is usually the case with Bryson, entertaining account of evolution of the English language. I don’t consider myself a word or language nerd at all, yet I loved all the trivia, such as those that I’ve quoted below.
The only reason that I’m giving it 4 stars rather than 5 is that it’s a bit dated. It was written in 1990 before the internet age. I would simply love to see an updated version. All in all, this was a fun and informative read.

Having lived in Britain and the U.S., I have noticed the following for years and couldn’t agree more with Bill Bryson:
“No place in the English-speaking world is more breathtakingly replete with dialects than Great Britain. In America, people as far apart as New York State and Oregon speak with largely identical voices. According to some estimates almost two thirds of the American population, living on some 8o percent of the land area, speak with the same accent—a quite remarkable degree of homogeneity.
If we define dialect as a way of speaking that fixes a person geographically, then it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that in England there are as many dialects as there are hills and valleys. Just in the six counties of northern England, an area about the size of Maine, there are seventeen separate pronunciations for the word house.”

I thought that this was interesting:
“Webster was responsible for the American aluminum in favor of the British aluminium. His choice has the fractional advantage of brevity, but defaults in terms of consistency. Aluminium at least follows the pattern set by other chemical elements— potassium, radium, and the like.”

The following had me chuckling:

“… 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. ‘Oh,’ she blurted, ‘but I do my own dusting.’

And this:
“In 1989, some 77 percent of all new college graduates had taken no foreign language courses.
There is evidence to suggest that some members of Congress aren’t fully sympathetic with the necessity for a commercial nation to be multilingual. As one congressman quite seriously told Dr. David Edwards, head of the Joint National Committee on Languages, ‘If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for me,’ [Quoted in the Guardian, April 30, 1988].”

This was quite a fascinating and entertaining book, up until the point where Bill Bryson claims that Finns don't swear. That when they stub their toes, they say "ravintolassa" (in the the restaurant). Right. I've never heard that expression, but I've sure heard a whole plethora of other fascinating swear words depicting all manner of hell, damnation, and body parts. After all, "perkele, saatana, vittu" are the first three words most foreigners learn and particularly the last one (female body part) is sprinkled into conversation as filler, much like the German word "aber". So that's when the whole book fell apart for me, because if he couldn't get this part right, what other things might he have been wrong about? Earlier I had thought it fascinating that Lithuanian is one of the oldest European languages. I doubt it now.

The book is entertaining and goes a long way to explain how English is spoken in so many parts of the world, much more so than Portuguese, another colonial language. It delves into history, dialects, distribution - and the aforementioned swear words. One more thing: don't try this on audio like I did. I heard so many words spelled out that my ears are still smarting.

Bryson is neither a linguist or a historian.

Neither am I, but I mention his lack of credentials because he makes many mistakes in those areas with utter confidence.

I would like to say that anything which Bryson claims without a specific citation should be considered unfounded rumor, but I'm not terribly confident that all of his citations are from sound sources. In fact, considering his misunderstanding of what I thought were common words I'm not certain that his citations from reliable sources would actually back him up.

The following example especially annoyed me:

"A rich vocabulary carries with it a concomitant danger of verbosity, as evidenced by our peculiar affection for redundant phrases, expressions that say the same thing twice: beck and call, law and order, assault and battery, null and void, safe and sound, first and fore-most. . ."

Bryson is wrong that these terms are redundant. They each convey two related ideas in order to form a complete impression.

A beck is a gestural request (as in beckon) while a call is verbal. Law refers the formal codified rules of society while order describes the general state of organization and a lack of chaos. Assault means an attack (including an attempted or threatened attack), while battery clarifies that actual physical violence was initiated. When something is made null it loses all past efficacy (as in a nullified contract, whose terms are considered never to have been valid), while to void something removes all future efficacy (as a used coupon might be voided). Safe means not in danger, and sound means unharmed. First is a time-related term implying subsequent tasks, while foremost specifies importance and implies less important tasks.

Bryson actually continues with many more phrases incorrectly identified as redundant, but I will spare you the additional pedantry. My point is that Bryson often makes this sort of incorrect claim and expounds on it at length. He doesn't only make cursory mistakes, he makes fundamental errors and then draws conclusions from them.

The book is also, through no fault of its author, 23 years out-of-date. It was published in 1991 and right at the beginning it asserts that more than 300 million people in the world speak English. Estimates of the number of people who speak English in the world today range from 500 million to more than double that number. Later on the book asserts that 40 or 50 million people in India speak English. For comparison, according to Wikipedia there are over 125 million English speakers in India, 90 million in Pakistan, and 30 million in Bangladesh. All of the speculation about the ways that English might diverge into unintelligible regional variants seem ridiculous viewed through the lens of the internet.

On top of all that the book is generally unstructured, apart from the general themes of the chapters. It constantly ranges between historical anecdotes, discussions of grammatical rules, and observations about amusing names. While I enjoyed it, I find it impossible to recommend.

‘We have not the faintest idea whether the first words spoken were uttered 20,000 years ago or 200, 000 years ago.’

Okay, this book was published back in 1990. No, it hasn’t sat on my bookshelf for quite that long, but when I rediscovered it a couple of weeks ago, I knew it was time to finally read it. Bill Bryson asks: ‘How did English, 'treated for centuries as the inadequate and second-rate tongue of peasants' become the undisputed global language?’

I enjoyed this meandering journey through the English language, how it is that humans can speak, examining how English developed, and looking at some of the many influences on English. I particularly enjoyed reading about the differences between British and American English, the evolution of swearing, and some of the (at times) humorous translations from other languages into English.

Yes, it is both entertaining and informative, and for those who want more, a select bibliography is included.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

You have to be a special kind of language and word geek to truly like this book, but I found everything that Bryson had to say about the origin of words fascinating. Not only did I learn the history of the English language, but I got a feel for how this truly is a globalized planet where communication was developed by need, and the fact that humans have spent centuries invaded other territories.

I learned a lot of fun facts, such as how many writers (and especially William Shakespeare) made up words, some of which caught on and some of which didn't. I also understood better the history of the "whys?" as in, "Why is a word pronounced as it is, or used as it is?"

As a writing teacher, I've been somewhat of a snob regarding proper grammar, spelling, and sentence structure, and now, after reading this book, I'm wondering how much of my view of "proper" will be regarded as antiquated and inappropriate in a couple of generations. I was particularly fascinated discovering just how many words and phrases that are either exalted or derided these days were actually quite the opposite in their history of usage.

I hate to say that everyone should read this book, because I already said it is more appropriate for the students of language in history; however, those who do read the book might get a better sense that it is not always appropriate to ever claim that you are positively right about anything at all when it comes to the chosen language of your country.

English is the most ubiquitous language used in the world. Even though the number of people who use it as their mother tongue is really small, the rapidly expanding clientele who employ it as a second language make it the world’s most common tongue. It is the most global of languages, the lingua franca of business, sciences, education and politics. Other countries excel the US and UK in many aspects of the language’s everyday usage. In India, there are more than 3000 newspapers in English while there are more students of English in China than there are people in the US. Even this humble blog is the contribution of a person who uses English as a second language and the fact that it has used some 600,000 words so far makes him a little smug! This book was published in 1990, but its point has become further relevant with the spread of computers and the internet. Bill Bryson needs no introduction and he remains one of my favorites.

Bryson’s humour is legendary, but it is strangely subdued in this volume. Anyway, the very first sentence of the book carries the author’s signature with the candid assertion that “more than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to”. This book is not a history of the language nor can it be termed a thorough study in the linguistic sense. Bryson examines many aspects of the tongue’s everyday usage like spelling, American and British varieties, pronunciation, origin of common names, word play and even a chapter on swearing. The narrative is liberally suffused with wit, but not as much as Bryson’s other books.

English now dominates the world beyond doubt, but there was a time when it hung tenaciously on to its home country base whose political power had changed hands many times to foreigners who didn’t even speak a word of it. England remained for a long time under external occupation. The Roman conquest brought civilization to the island, but Viking invasions transformed its structure. Then came the Norman Conquest when the French ruled the roost. No king of England spoke English till 1399 CE when Henry IV began to use it. As recently as the eighteenth century, England chose to install George I, a German, even though he didn’t know English but reigned for thirteen years. The language assumed an inferior position in the Norman society in which the aristocracy was French-speaking while the peasantry spoke English. Linguistic influence of Normans tended to focus on matters of court, government, fashion and high living. That’s why we still see a lot of French-derived words in these domains. However, Bryson points out that it is a cherishable irony that a language that succeeded almost by stealth, treated for centuries as the inadequate and second-rate tongue of peasants, should one day become the most important and successful language in the world.

There are about 2700 languages in the world, of which India leads with 1600 languages and dialects. English has borrowed without any let or hindrance from most of them. Bryson reviews the pathways in which foreign words accrued into his mother tongue. Probably, this makes the English extremely reluctant to learn other languages. The author wonders at the staggering quantity of words accrued. Bryson does not elaborate on one important source of words for English – India. A good number of Indian words have entered the lexicon of the colonial masters after nearly two centuries of imperialist rule over India. Great literary figures have also contributed to the language in the case of new words. Shakespeare used 17,677 words in his writings of which at least a tenth had never been used before, which is an astonishing display of ingenuity. It is also true that the great dramatist and poet lived in an age when words and ideas burst upon the world as never before or since.

The book hints at the powerful urge for standardization when a language loses its insularity and whole societies start to handle them simultaneously. This process began in the fifteenth century with the invention of the printing press. This brought a measure of much needed uniformity to English spelling. Before 1400, it was possible to tell with some precision where in Britain a letter or manuscript was written just from the spellings. By 1500, this had become all but impossible. London spellings became increasingly fixed and standardization was achieved by 1650. With television, the differences between the two most favorite flavors of English are disappearing fast. Since this book came out just before the internet boom, its effect is not analysed.

This book includes a delightful array of words, phrases and comparison with other languages which is ideal for novices and experienced readers of English. This book is a page-turner, but the chapter on names and pronouncing place names is rather clumsy and uninteresting to non-US and UK readers.

The book is highly recommended.

Is the fact that my grandfather gave me this book reason enough to keep reading? Some of the stories are interesting, and even reasonably factual, but at other times the failed fact-checking is glaringly obvious--and come on, the perpetuation of the "Eskimo Snow Myth"?
I think the lesson here is that as a linguist, I should not be reading popular writings about language. It's true that there are a thousand interesting things to encounter in the history of the English language, replete as it is with situations of language contact. I think what bothers me most is the very thinly veiled "linguo"centrism that turns it from a piece of enthusiastic writing about the English language into a poorly-argued case for why English is better than every other language on the planet. As a native English speaker who spends every day contemplating and studying other languages, I can't disagree strongly enough with a message like that.

Bill Bryson's book on the English language is a compendium of linguistic trivia interspersed with the author's musings on the history and features of the language. The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way was written before the Internet changed the way the world communicates and hence a lot of the content regarding the spread of languages is hopelessly outdated by now. There are probably better books on the history of the English language and there are probably deeper books on the nature of linguistics — but Bryson's tackles something that we all ought to be interested in, with style, flare and humor.

Thanks to Oliver for putting this one up here. It's a great tour of the history of the English language, from its origins to its current diffusion as the de facto business language of the world. The story of English is told with Bryson's characteristic wit and mother tongue-in-cheek asides -- though the book is a bit outdated and contains some points now known to be apocryphal.

I prefer nonfiction that changes the way you put things in context, that gives you a new lens to view everyday things. What [The Blind Watchmaker] did for biology and the living world, what Omnivore's Dilemma did for food, Mother Tongue has done for the way I read and listen to others -- and has given me a new appreciation when listening to ESOL speakers try to articulate what should be a simple thought. More than anything, however, it has affirmed my belief that language is as much a way to have fun obfuscating thought as it is a way to clearly and effectively communicate it, and I look forward to a future of conducting cognitive warfare on my soon-to-be-former friends