The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language

Reading this mind-blower created four significant changes in my brain: 1) It changed my approach to learning languages, as I was previously stuck trying to learn them through the rules of my own. 2) It caused me to understand why certain cultures speak the language of another culture in the same curious ways. 3) It gave me clarity on the exceptions in the English language. 4) It shoved a helluva pile of information in which won't leave very soon. Penultimately satisfying was his sense of humor, which he brandishes via superfun and apropos pop-culture references which mostly did not go over my head. Most satisfying of all was his origin story, which allows the reader to crystally understand the writer's passion, and appreciate his works show more in a most emphatic manner. show less

This is another fun language book by McWhorter. This volume is organized around looking at all the ways that languages change and evolve over time. McWhorter describes a rich variety of changes that languages and dialects can undergo. We've all heard and read about how languages can change in pronunciation over time, and how word meanings can evolve. But that is only the start of McWhorter's entertaining and informative tour through the evolution of language.

Complex language features---such as inflection or the use of tone---come and go over time, and McWhorter provides some fascinating insights into how and why this type of change happens. He also describes a variety of other complexities that arise in the world's languages, but are show more generally unfamiliar to folks like me who are mostly only familiar with Romance or Indo-European languages.

There is a large (and interesting) section of the book devoted to pidgins and creoles. Creoles are essentially new languages that spring into being when people who use a much simpler pidgin are compelled to rely almost exclusively on that pidgin for communication of a long period of time. The resulting Creole is a true language with a grammar and vocabulary that provide sufficient expressiveness for the full range of human communications. McWhorter argues that since Creoles are less evolved, the common features across creole languages are probably a good indication of the types of features that would have been present in the earliest human language.

Another interesting aspect of the book was the contrasting of more isolated, regional languages and more wide-spread languages such as English, Hindi, Chinese, or Arabic. The truly bizarre and hard to grasp linguistic complexities are much more likely to be found in the more isolated languages, where most if not all speakers learn the language natively as children. Once a language gets big enough that many people are learning it as a second language, those rough edges get softened over time. Thus, for example, Swahili, a language adopted by many adults as a second language, is generally considered the "easiest" of the Bantu languages.

There are many other interesting aspects of language evolution in this book. How do languages change when the mix with each other, whether due to migration, trade, or conquest? What happens when a language starts getting written down? How do languages change as they die out? Do we have any hope of reconstructing the original human language?

The book is full of interesting examples English and other languages readers may know, such as French, German, and Russian, and from languages readers are unlikely to have heard of, such as Ngan'gityemerri, an Aborigine language from northern Australia. And McWhorter tells his story with enthusiasm and a pleasant sprinkling of personal anecdotes and asides, both relevant (such as his personal experience grappling with different German dialects) and merely entertaining (such as his musings on the quality of art in turn-of-the-century comic strips). show less

In this wonderful book about how languages develop John McWhorter does a excellent job of showing the complexity and diversity of the forms of human verbal communication. The book is subtitled “A Natural History of Language” and McWhorter uses the analogy with biological evolution and biodiversity throughout, describing how language has developed over the millennia since the first language arose (probably in East Africa) parallels the slower branching of lifeforms from the first single celled organisms.

He gives many examples of how languages have changed and formed new languages, even within modern recorded history – especially amongst the patois created by the enforced mixing of people speaking different tongues that was a result show more of the slave trade. Explaining how pidgins develop in situations where the basics of communication are needed, he then shows how these become creoles – that is, languages formed from the constituent parts of others languages, often words from one or more language tacked onto the simplified grammar of another – and how it is a short step to these developing into full languagehood themselves – indeed, many languages that are designated 'creoles' are, in actual fact, fully-fledged languages but are retain the image either from historical precedent (that is, it began as a creole) or that the use of, for example, English words embedded into a different grammar sound 'simplistic' to the ears of a native English speaker (in a slightly different context he gives the example of an old-fashioned Hollywood Red Indian saying “white man say no kill buffalo, heap big lie”, which is actually how many Native Americans did speak English, and is perfectly acceptable grammar in many Amerindian languages).

Of course, while languages change by growth, accreting grammatical and linguistic flourishes that often seem massively redundant and (especially to the new learner) completely pointless as well as adopting and borrowing from other languages, language also changes by the speakers dropping sounds. McWhorter gives many examples of this, most notably in French and Italian which, while both equally descended from Latin, have changed in quite random ways in the sounds that have been dropped and the words that have been contracted into each other. A fairly recent example in English is also the word “every”, which well into the period of modern English was too separate words “ever each”, and from which the final “-ch” sound was easily dropped.

Recent history has also seen languages tending to be classified as 'advanced' or 'simple', those doing the classifying being from the Western world and, of course, classing their own language families as the advanced ones (indeed, this isn't just a recent phenomenon; the word 'barbarian' comes from the fact that the ancient Greeks thought the language of the Northern savages sounded like 'bar-bar-bar-bar'), while in actual fact developed world languages tend to be simpler than others for the simple reason that technology ossifies a language at a given moment, and both puts limits on what is acceptable grammar and vocabulary and slows down the rate of diversification and change. This begins to happen as soon as language is codified into a written form, but accelerates markedly with the introduction of printing. This is also, of course, the reason that many cultures differentiate 'proper' language from dialects of the language; McWhorter also goes to some length to argue that there are only dialects, it is simply that the particular dialect of a region which gained political and economic leverage at a moment in history becomes codified as the 'correct' form to which those of other regions are considered pale, inferior, brutish imitations. That there is really no difference between a language and a dialect – McWhorter's refrain is that there is only dialect – is, to anyone who has studied language at all in the past thirty years, not news and he does belabour the point slightly, although perhaps this is necessary for some of the audience. This is also where his extended metaphor breaks down somewhat; while in biological evolution survival is dependent upon 'fitness' to a situation, in the terms of language it is pure chance – both in terms of which languages / dialects gain prominence and power AND in how a language evolves. McWhorter goes to great pains to show that ere is no such thing as an inferior language – even to the point of stating that “Black English”, as spoken by many of young people of all colours in America and the UK, is a perfectly valid linguistic form, however it might make some people cringe – without ever recognising this slight flaw in his analogy.

However, this is a very, very minor quibble. This is a superb book that anyone with an interest in language should read. McWhorter writes from a position of immense knowledge with a gift for explanation and an eye for humour (trust me, there are some real laughs to be had herein), even if his gag reflex does occasionally get the better of him. More importantly, his passion for language – all language – suffuses every page. I wanted to say that his writing as as clear as Crystal, for my money Cambridge language expert David Crystal is perhaps the most lucid writer on language around, but the joy and enthusiasm that McWhorter brings to the subject is quite unmatched. show less

In this book, published in 2001, linguist John McWhorter sets out to show how humans’ protolanguage, which emerged some 150,000 years ago, has since morphed into over 600,00 varieties. Since that time, numerous languages have come and gone, with many today on life support. It is a book heavy on detailed examples from cultures across the globe. While academic in tone, McWhorter weaves humor throughout to help deliver the points he makes.

He discusses how regional dialects are actually languages of their own, ones that were subsumed somewhat when a prevailing dialect was proclaimed a country’s official language. Also addressed are the rise and use of pidgin and creole thanks to slavery bringing together different cultures needing an show more easy way to communicate. In time, many later became established languages. Also examined is the effect of the written word on the world’s languages. With the advent of literate societies, the rate of change that takes place in spoken interactions has noticeably slowed.

The Power of Babel is a book I found best to ingest in small, manageable chunks. While at times it dives a bit too deep into the weeds, McWhorter does an admirable job of explaining how and why a protolanguage, long lost to time, has blossomed and branched into so many unique ways of speaking. It is a thoughtful and illuminating read. show less

The Power of Babel is pretty much what it says (or implies) on the cover: it's a book about how languages grew to the diversity they have today. It discusses various elements of language in general and shows how these elements work with actual languages (or dialects, or pidgins, or creoles), as well as how they change or morph as languages themselves change.

For the most part, having had a few introductory/basic linguistics classes as well as having had a classical Greek instructor who kept inserting evolutionary linguistics into our lessons, most of the concepts were familiar to me, but I learned a lot from the examples and now feel that I have a much broader and more thorough understanding of the history of language. McWhorter is very show more easy to understand; he states in the introduction that he tried to keep the non-linguists in mind when writing, and so mostly avoids things like IPA or highly technical terms without explanation.

It's super clear from the reading that McWhorter finds a kind of joy in studying the diversity of language, and I think that anyone who reads the book will be able to appreciate it, if not discover their own joy/fascination. But, then, I may be biased, due to my own predisposition towards being fascinated by language diversity and beauty.

Although when discussing creoles, pidgins, dialects, and various elements of language (such as articles, gender markers, or different kinds of inflections) McWhorter is careful to use examples from all over the world, rather than limiting them to any particular region or type of language, I found that the book as a whole is most suitable for Americans and maybe Canadians. He includes a lot of pop culture references that I am only vaguely familiar with, but which I know to be part of the American cultural knowledge - I suspect that people from other English-speaking countries might find these references flying over their heads. That said, most of the references aren't strictly necessary for understanding, but rather provide further context for a concept, or an analogy from a different field.

The primary negative to the book goes along with McWhorter's references to pop culture. He uses a friendly, familiar voice that often includes asides or digressions either in the main text or included as a footnote. While some of these are interesting notes about the topic at hand, most of them are personal comments or observations that would have done better to be left out. I suppose that other people might find them to be a sort of ...softening or something to keep the book from being too academic.

On the whole, I do recommend The Power of Babel to anyone who has a passing interest in how languages have developed to where they are today. It was interesting all the way through, without any dull spots, and was easy to read. Plus, it's fairly short - only 300 pages in the paperback edition I have. show less

John McWhorter will dazzle you with insights into what language is and what it is not. Many of our assumptions are just wrong. Language is verbal behavior that tends to change over time. We may feel compelled to follow the rules made up by grammarians, but deep down language is arbitrary; most languages are festooned with grammatical frills that are unnecessary to basic communication. So-called primitive languages are often more elaborate and complicated than languages spoken by what McWhorter calls "tall building" cultures. Also languages that live next to each other tend to pick up each other's traits.

Language tends to have surprisingly little to do with culture and more to do with accidents and the erosion of words in the native show more speaker's mouth. Much of what I thought I knew about language turns out to be wrong. show less

This to me read like a lecturer in linguistics has written a book based on his lectures for a term to slightly backward students.
The subject matter is absolutely fascinating, but he tends to ram home the point he's making three times over and then when the next lecture (chapter) begins, reiterates major points from previous lectures (chapters). I read this reasonably fast and so didn't require constant reminders of what had gone before (I got it the first time usually, thank you).
So if you have the stamina to cope with his repetitions, his sense of humour is lovely and comes across really well on the page (ad breaks during the lectures!).
I got about two thirds of the way through this and then finally couldn't cope with constantly being show more treated like an imbecile, so I moved on. Maybe I should have shown more patience... show less