'The Study of Language' by G. Yule

George Yule has worked as an English teacher in four different countries and has taught Applied Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh. He has also written many books on grammar and the English language; however, this one is most accessible to the public with no prior knowledge required.

This textbook contains twenty chapters, each addressing a fundamental part of linguistics. He covers an incredible range of topics, including morphology and the role language plays in society. At the end of each section are some ‘study questions’ which required you to recall a fact or a name and then are a list of intriguing discussion topics which are great starters for further research.

The study of language is written in a very concise and orderly way and therefore appropriate for beginners as an introduction. It also links very closely to the linguistics and English language degree and therefore may be a good starting point for research; however, each topic may seem very brief because the book covers so many areas of linguistics.

Bill Bryson’s ‘Mother Tongue: the English Language’.

This is very different from Bryson’s travel writing; however, he pulls it off. Following his earlier book ‘Made in America’ he devotes a few chapters to American English, but more about the language rather than culture influences as seen in his other works.

He covers many topics from ‘the dawn of language’ to ‘the future of English’ showing the accepted academic opinion without being afraid of sharing his own. For example, his unique theory how Homo sapiens was able to succeed Neanderthal Man through more sophisticated language.

He [homo sapiens] possessed a linguistic system sufficiently sophisticated to deal with concepts such as: ‘Today let’s kill some red deer. You take some big sticks and drive the deer out of the woods and we’ll stand by the riverbank with our spears and kill them as they come towards us’. By comparison Neanderthal speech may have been something more like: ‘I’m hungry let’s hunt.’

 Nearing the end of the book he explores many light-hearted topics including ‘swearing’ and ‘wordplay’. You will learn many surprising facts as he addresses a mass of topics and is able to string them together effortlessly.

Despite its’ popularity, I must criticise this book for the amount of factual errors it contains. Since it was published in 1990, it does not show modern research and therefore many ideas are outdated. But Bryson did not sell this as a reference book, instead a lively introduction to language. He uses humour to set this book a part from more academic works, making this accessible to anyone with no prior knowledge on language.