The Mother Tongue Bill Bryson
Harper Peren­nial 1991World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

Although he is best known as a travel writer, Bill Bryson spent a num­ber of years as a copy edi­tor. Know­ing that, it is unsur­pris­ing that two of his ear­li­est books (and one of his more recent ones) are about language.

In this book, he makes the bold attempt to trace Eng­lish from the begin­ning of human lan­guage to the present day. He details large lin­guis­tic shake-ups of the sort that accom­pany inva­sions, occu­pa­tions, and less vio­lent cul­tural meld­ing. Also promi­nent are the sort of diver­gent evo­lu­tion that result in sep­a­rate dialects, or even sep­a­rate lan­guages over long peri­ods of time. Bryson does a good job of demon­strat­ing bor­row­ing between lan­guages, show­ing that the flow is almost never unidirectional.

I find some of Bryson’s claims to be dubi­ous, or at least chau­vin­is­tic, but this is meant to be an enter­tain­ing book, not a piece of schol­arly writ­ing. And it is quite enter­tain­ing. Humor per­vades this book, both cre­ated by Bryson and inher­ent in the sub­ject matter.

One of the most inter­est­ing things about this book is unin­ten­tional, yet inevitable. In the fif­teen or so years since it was pub­lished, parts of this book have become out-of-date. How bet­ter to demon­strate the flu­id­ity of Eng­lish usage?