The book may be a bit dated now and some of the facts may not be accurate, but what a fun read.

Other mammals have no contact between their airways and esophagi. They can breathe and swallow at the same time. No possibility of food going down the wrong way. With Homo sapiens, food and drink must pass over the larynx on the way to the gullet. Constant risk that some of it will be inhaled. The larynx descends in humans between the age of 3 and 5 months, the exact age when Sudden Infant Death occurs. But the descended larynx explains why we can speak and our pets cannot. That ability to speak made such a difference in our evolution.

The word "pease" in "pease porridge hot" was singular. But people thought it was plural, so "pea" back then formed as a singular.

In "Pippa Passes," Robert Browning uses the word "twat," which meant the same thing then as it does now, but he did not realize it. He thought it was a nun's hat instead of a nun's. . . .well you know.

Although English is a Germanic language, we have borrowed fewer words from German than almost any language.

No one has any idea how the word "dog" came to replace the word "hound."

Gutenberg may have gotten more credit than he deserves for inventing the printing press. He learned of the process when an apprentice of Laurens Koster ran off with some of his blocks.

Well meaning people added "b" to "doubt" and "debt" to keep it more like the Latin. Same with the "p" in "receipt."

The last words of French grammarian Dominique Bonhours: "I am about to--or I am going to--die; either expression is used."

Noah Webster produced a sanitized version of the Bible. In it, men have "peculiar members" instead of testicles, and women do not have wombs or anything else with which to contribute to the reproductive process. Such a fear of the human body. Where does it come from?

The Oxford English Dictionary insists that Shakespeare should be spelled Shakspere. They add that the commonest spelling "is perh. Shakespeare." Bryson adds "it cert. is."

The last name Bush came from wine merchants always having a bush by the front door. Goldwater was a synonym for urine.

He has a great list of place names from America, including Maggie's Nipples, Wyoming.

In 1970 under test conditions, Roy Dean solved the London Times crossword puzzle in 3 minutes and 45 seconds. An unbelievable feat.

Alfred Butts invented the game Scrabble in 1931. He insisted on two of each letter, so q, j, and z can be a problem. He deliberately depressed the number of s's. He increased the number of i's to encourage the use of suffixes. The highest score in 1987 was 3,881 points. It included the word psycholoanalyzing for 1,539 points.

A list of anagrams:

Ronald Wilson Reagan = Insane Anglo Warlord
Spiro Agnew = Grow a Penis
two plus eleven = one plus twelve
Western Union = No Wire Unsent
circumstantial evidence = can ruin a selected victim
funeral = real fun
The Morse Code = Here come dots
mother-in-law = woman Hitler
Victoria, England's Queen = governs a nice quiet land
William Shakespeare = We all make his praise

In Chinese, to call someone a turtle is the worst possible taunt. The Japanese have no swear words at all. The Romans had 800 swear words.

3.75⭐️

How Bill Bryson makes seemingly one-note, mundane topics interesting is beyond me!

As a language lover, The Mother Tongue is fun and informative. I read this for my college rhetoric class, and fell in love with the enjoyable read with knowledge worthy of an upper level college English class. Bryson's true gift is in making the nature of linguistics both understandable and relevant. The author has fun playing with words - I laughed out loud multiple times. The best chapter is the one on what is considered obscene language, not because it feels good to curse, but because it increases your cultural awareness and empathy to think about how a conquering nation determines what words are proper and what words are vile. It might make you think twice before you correct the way someone speaks with a regional dialect. Bryson isn't about prescriptive grammar and language elitism, but about exploring the nature of human communication. Should we really isolate someone because they speak differently than we do? Language is a natural and essential aspect of the human condition and the more you know about language evolution and acquisition, the more you should appreciate the diversity of successful communications.

I am fascinated by languages and how words evolve, so I was intrigued by this. But there were several parts that sounded inaccurate, so I looked a bit further into a couple of claims. The Finnish not having swear words was one, and it’s been a while since I finished it, but there were parts about how English was so unique, and other languages could never do all these things, and so I checked. And a lot of the things he said, if not blatantly false, were at least misleading or mistaken. That kind of took the shine off for me because it made me question the accuracy of the rest of the book, and for a nonfiction book, that is not a good thing.

I always enjoy a Bill Bryson book. I love his sense of humour and the way he can turn the driest subject into something entertaining. Of course that does mean you cannot believe a word of it since he is always looking for the most shocking or the most amusing way to present each topic. Why ruin a good joke with the truth?
So if you are looking for an erudite and trustworthy account of the development of the English language I am sure there are many very worthy tomes out there! This is just for fun and it is absolutely that, lots and lots of fun.
Having said that there are lots of interesting bits which really make you think about what you say and write every day, things that you may have never actually noticed. Lots and lots of 'aha' moments:) I enjoyed it very much.

Bryson's book on the English language is a compendium of linguistic trivia interspersed with the author's biased and misinformed musings on the history and features of the language. Published in 1990, the book was written before Internet changed the way the world communicates and hence a lot of the content regarding the spread of languages is hopelessly outdated by now.

Bryson is not a linguist, neither is he a historian. Therefore his attempts to explain the popularity and status of English as the lingua franca of the modern world come off haphazard at best. Bryson's love for his native English is clear enough; so is his painfully obvious lack of knowledge of any other languages. I did not care to keep count of the times he falsely asserts some feature in English cannot be found in any other language or blatantly moves the goalposts to prove how infinitely richer English is compared to anything.

For all the little anecdotes and copious bits of trivia it contains, I really want to like the book more than I do. Unfortunately once it becomes clear that many of these factoids won't stand up to closer scrutiny -- Bryson doesn't even blink as he repeats the age-old and very disputed claim that the Eskimos have 50 words for snow -- it becomes hard to believe anything the book claims.

The most baffling and outrageous claim of all is the one that strikes closest to home. Bryson has the audacity to suggest we Finns have no native swear words and use the phrase "in the restaurant" as a curse instead. Perkele, I say.

Surprisingly, I didn’t find this as engaging as his other books.

For years friends have been telling me that I would love Bill Bryson's work. We have a lot in common: expatriated mid-Westerners, sense of humor, love of travel, similar interests. So when I saw this book in an airport bookstore, I decided to take the plunge.

Generally speaking, it was a good book; a well organized survey of the field. I truly enjoyed several parts of it. But, alas, it didn't reach out and grab me and, for the first time in a long time, I finished a book feeling that I didn't get my money's worth (perhaps the fact that the book was in an over-priced airport bookstore contributed, but it's not the only reason).

I was distracted early on by his explanations of certain word usage in Australia and Japan which, from my own experiences in those places, I know to be incorrect or inaccurate. Needless to say, this caused me to question the accuracy of other information in the book, which was a further distraction.

I think next time I'll try one of Bryson's travel-related books and see if he does better with that.

I quit reading this book after reading a short list of all the errors in the book. Bryson certainly isn't a linguist, but he doesn't appear to be much of a researcher either: http://everything2.com/title/The+Moth...

Whew, dense and difficult to get through which is why I read it off and on for a year, but fascinating. Some great stuff I’ll remember and a lot I’ll forget because there were so many examples for every point.

I'm a longtime fan of Bill Bryson, but I had never read this early nonfiction work of his and was delighted to see that my library had a copy of the audiobook.

"The Mother Tongue" has the expected rambling charm of a Bryson nonfiction work. When he becomes enamored on a topic (such as the history of our houses in "At Home" or the history of our universe in "A Short History of Nearly Everything") Bryson digs up all kinds of interesting facts and stories and anecdotes and puts it all together in a delightfully interesting collection of essays. In this book, he discusses the history of the English language, but also the history of languages in general, the history of dictionaries, and many of the odd pronunciations and spellings that are so peculiar to English.

Knowing that "The Mother Tongue" was published in 1990, I had fun imagining what additions Bryson would have added to the text today, knowing how many new words have been adopted since the Internet took over our world. Overall, this was a pleasant read and is a nice complement to other books that have been written about the English language. Recommended.

Opening Passage
"More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to. It would be charitable to say that the results are sometimes mixed. Consider this hearty announcement in a Yugoslavian hotel: 'The flattening of underwear with pleasure is the job of the chambermaid. Turn to her straightaway.' Or this warning to motorists in Tokyo: 'When a passenger of the foot heave in sight, tootle the horn. Trumpet at him melodiously at first, but if he still obstacles your passage, then tootle him with vigor.' Or these instructions gracing a packet of convenience food from Italy: 'Besmear a backing pan, previously buttered with a good tomato sauce, and, after dispose the cannelloni, lightly distanced between them in a only couch.' Clearly the writer of that message was not about to let a little ignorance of English stand in the way of a good meal. In fact, it would appear that one of the beauties of the English language is that even with the most tenuous grasp you can speak volumes if you show enough enthusiasm — a willingness to tootle with vigor, as it were."

I know and I do even realise that Bill Bryson is considered an entertaining author and that he also seems to be much loved and appreciated by many. However, I for one have generally and usually found Bryson’s general tone of narrational voice and the boastful, arrogant demeanour he constantly seems to present and yes indeed often downright spew in The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way extremely off-putting and really at best massively condescending, with his claims regarding the supposed superiority of the English language both unacademic and yes, profoundly bigoted and stereotyping (and as such of course absolutely devoid of any kind of linguistic acumen and actual bona fide language based knowledge). And albeit granted that English is at present a so-called and even aptly labelled world language, the reasons why English is such, the reasons why English is so profoundly popular and globally strong at present are NOT (at least in in my humble opinion) due to any type of linguistic superiority, they are primarily and simply cultural and historic in nature and also have much to do with economics and not with English being in any manner a better and superior language linguistically speaking than French, German, Chinese, Russian and so on and so on.

And quite frankly, Mr. Bryson (and if you are perhaps offended by this, sorry, but I really and truly care not), your considerations about English and that you somehow think and assume the language is somehow better, is supposedly more advanced and of higher quality than other languages, this attitude truly makes me as a person of German background cringe profoundly, as it so strongly and uncomfortably does tend to remind me of the type of rhetoric that was used in the Third Reich by Adolf Hitler and his ilk to claim and attempt to demonstrate that German (that the Germanic languages) were supposedly both linguistically and genetically superior and more advanced than other language groups and families. However, languages are simply languages and in my opinion (and actually in the opinion of many if not most academically trained linguists worth considering) NO language is thus in any manner and in any way superior and those who attempt to claim this (especially if they are categorical and unilateral in and with their philosophies) are at best profoundly naive and at worst downright and frighteningly dangerous and full of propaganda. One star (and really, with The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way, I actually almost wish I could give less than one star, and I have since reading or should I say since attempting to peruse this book actively shied away from trying any more offerings from Bill Bryson's pen, his seeming general popularity notwithstanding, especially and in particular since many of the "facts" the author has cited to cement his claims that English as a language is supposedly somehow superior to and of better and more lasting quality than other world languages are academically wrong anyhow, are not the truth or only partially the truth, and for a non-fiction linguistic tome, this just is not in any way even remotely acceptable).