The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way

By Bill Bryson

Categories: History, Reference

The Mother Tongue (1990) is Bill Bryson's lighthearted history of the English language; this is the Perennial paperback edition. Bryson traces English from its Germanic roots through the Viking and Norman invasions to its spread as a global language, and digs into its oddities: where words come from, why pronunciation and spelling diverge, how dialects and grammar rules arose, and how American and British English differ. Chapters on names, swearing and wordplay, from palindromes to crosswords, show the playful side of an untidy tongue.

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• Tim Ferriss: “I've read I think it was Mother Tongue , which he wrote about the evolution of the English language.”