Mother Tongue: The Story of the English Language

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The second is worse; in the chapter on American accents and dialects he starts by agreeing that the USA shows less regional variation than britain and ends suggesting that there is, in fact, one dialect per person. Of course so much of this discussion is the concern of some to promote the good and proper use of the language, and yet what is fascinating is the shifting ideas through history of what this is, according to Bryson. When he becomes enamored on a topic (such as the history of our houses in "At Home" or the history of our universe in "A Short History of Nearly Everything") Bryson digs up all kinds of interesting facts and stories and anecdotes and puts it all together in a delightfully interesting collection of essays.

November 2021: Went ahead and removed my 4 star rating for this book, which I read and reviewed in 2006.My wife was lent this book by a British friend of ours, but I decided to read it as I've heard about Bill Bryson's popular travel books like Notes from a Small Island and book A Brief History of Everything, about his travels through England before moving back to the US after a long time in his adopted home. This was quite a fascinating and entertaining book, up until the point where Bill Bryson claims that Finns don't swear. Too bad the gems were scarce and some of the reading resembled the back-breaking labor involved in mining. The French don’t have the breadth of vocabulary to distinguish between “man” and “gentleman”, the way English speakers do, proclaims Bryson.

As a person who is not a native speaker, this book is very insightful in terms of how the most globalized language developed (and is still developing). I did not care to keep count of the times he falsely asserts some feature in English cannot be found in any other language or blatantly moves the goalposts to prove how infinitely richer English is compared to anything. Some people giving favourable reviews said that they weren't put off by it—it had been an entertaining read anyway. For example claiming that the German preposition/suffix "auf" is unusual among foreign words in that it has more than one meaning.I read this years ago, tried to read it to the kids at night, but they were just that bit young, and then listened to the talking book recently. He repeatedly dings Irish (and even more so Welsh) for having spellings that are bizarre, strange, overly convoluted, etc, when what he should mean is that the Irish language attaches sound values to the Latin alphabet that are different from those used by English. Ever since I learned to read, English has been my favourite language - I took to it like a duck takes to water (at least, I guess they take to it willingly, and that baby ducks are not paddled until their feathers fly by Mamma Duck to make them). So he's very much a bicultural American-Brit who can see different aspects of both societies from the inside and outside, and also has a wide-ranging intellect and deft sense of humor.