Mark Abley

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1. David Crystal

   Author of The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, The Stories of English

2. Steven Pinker

   Author of The Language Instinct, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, Words and Rules

3. John McWhorter

   Author of The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English

4. Bill Bryson

   Author of The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way, Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States

5. Simon Winchester

   Author of The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology, The Meaning of Everything

6. Nicholas Ostler

   Author of Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

7. Daniel Nettle

   Author of Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World's Languages

8. Robert McCrum

   Author of The Story of English, Globish: How the English Language Became the World's Language

9. Oliver Sacks

   Author of The Island of the Colorblind and Cycad Island, Seeing Voices

10. David Sacks

    Author of Language Visible

11. Mark C. Baker

    Author of The Atoms of Language: The Mind's Hidden Rules of Grammar

12. Henry Hitchings

    Author of Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr Johnson's Dictionary, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English

13. Guy Deutscher

    Author of The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention

14. Andrew Robinson

    Author of Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World's Undeciphered Scripts

15. John Baxter

    Author of A Pound of Paper: Confessions of a Book Addict

16. Henry Petroski

    Author of The Book on the Bookshelf

17. Miles Harvey

    Author of The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime

18. Tom Raabe

    Author of Biblioholism: The Literary Addiction

19. Peter Bowler

    Author of The Superior Person's Book of Words

20. Mark Kurlansky

    Author of The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation