100 books like How Language Works

How and why do languages get lost and die out? In this fascinating, beautifully written account, Evans presents a highly informative story about the scores of endangered languages in the world today.

Many languages are losing speakers because they are surrounded by groups that use a different majority language, and this pressures the minority-language speakers to stop using their own language.

The tragedy is that losing a language also means losing one’s culture and one’s history. This is a book that is hard to put down. 

This is a great introduction to what linguists do when they analyze languages to see how they work.

Bolinger spent his life observing how speakers use language, making notes on how and when they hesitate as they plan what to say, common errors they make, and what all this tells us about how language functions as a tool for communication. 

And he drew on his observations to tell the story of what is involved in studying how languages work. I regularly recommend this book to anyone who wants to know what linguistics is. (It is not being a polyglot!)

Levelt offers a wonderfully informative history of the sources of many current ideas in psycholinguistics. Levelt also shares major questions about language processing (how we understand and produce language).

He takes up ideas raised long ago, ideas that couldn’t be studied at the time without a phonetic alphabet. For example, without audio and video-recording methods or the sophisticated equipment for studying how language is stored in the brain, all available today. 

I find it salutary to recognize how much of what we think is new in today’s research was actually recognized and discussed at least a century ago or more.

The meanings of words allow us to convey all sorts of intentions, yet meanings change over time, get confused, or lost, or re-assigned to fit changes in society.

This book offers an accessible and thoughtful introduction to how meaning is used by speakers of a language. Lyons focuses on the relationships between the meanings of words. He examines specific semantic fields, such as terms for kin, farm animals, carpentry tools, plants, birds, and sailing.

He shows how the relations between words in a semantic field (e.g., animal, dog, spaniel; walk, stroll, run; mast, sail, tack, rig) play a critical role in terms of the meanings available when speakers combine words in their utterances. Word meanings are the basic building blocks in the constructions speakers use every day.

I must admit that I’m somewhat biased here, as Mark Baker was one of my professors in graduate school, but I love this book on its merits!

It’s very easy to think of languages as endlessly dissimilar from each other: what do English and Edo (one of the many languages in Nigeria) have in common? Or Navajo and Japanese? Or Tsotsil (spoken in Mexico) and Malagasy (spoken in Madagascar)?

It blew my mind how Baker takes a seemingly far-fetched parallel between language and chemistry and manages to show that the state-of-the-art linguistic theory allows us to find order and logic in the ostensibly chaotic variety of human languages, much like Mendeleev’s Periodic Table provides a structured way to see the tangible world around us.

In this witty and provocative book, psycholinguistics researcher Steven Pinker explores the role of language in shaping our experience of reality. 

Human-style thinking would not be possible without our capacity for language. Thoughts are basically internal language. Among the basic experiences shaped by linguistics is our experience of time. 

We use language to construct a spatial metaphor for time, thinking in terms of “moving” “forward” or “backward” in time. Pinker takes us for a walk around the metaphorical space of consciousness, examining how language shapes our experience of the world.   

Andrew Robinson has written an excellent biography of Michael Ventris and also of Champollion, the man who deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs. In this book he gives overviews of three decipherments and surveys of as undeciphered languages and languages that we can read but not necessarily understand (one of my favourite languages, Etruscan, falls into this category). This book is a great jumping-off point if you want to plunge into the waters of decipherment, and has excellent illustrations. 

I’ve always loved observing children as they learn to speak. But I never understood what a triumph that is until I read Stephen Pinker’s book. He explores a huge range of topics, including what we can learn from the mistakes children make, how languages develop, brain imaging, major ideas in philosophy, computer speech simulation, Noam Chomsky’s ideas about linguistics, and genetic research. And he does all that by focusing on regular and irregular verbs. Sounds dull? Think again. It’s a fascinating book.

Shariatmadari writes beautifully, and this book will make you think differently about how we use language and how that language uses and shapes us, both as individual actors and as a society. Our language – those everyday vocabularies and grammars that we deploy without a second thought – is neither original nor value-free; instead, “to speak is ‘to swim in an inherited stream of images and words’”, crafted by generations before us. For small talk, this may not matter so much. But for the bigger, weightier things in life, for the things that really matter, the way we talk can have real consequences on what we are able to understand, and how we are able to respond.

I first read this book at age twenty-one and have never stopped returning to it. It gets better and deeper each time.

Ludwig teaches that language and reality are bound up in so many ways. It also contains some famous themes and head-scratchers, such as language games, family resemblance, private language, and rule-following, discussed, as always, in a non-technical way.