The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way

Bryson writes from a very specific kind of perspective, one that is not quite self-aware of his privilege as a white man out in the world. I love books on linguistics, etymology, and language, but this one felt so problematic. His humor troubled me in this book because it felt clouded by inherent racism. I recognize this book was originally published in 1991, but...

“...we forget just how easily people forsake their tongues—as the Celts did in Spain and France, as the Vikings did in Normandy, and as the Italians, Poles, Africans, Russians, and countless others all did in America.” Forsake them? I feel like that implies that it was voluntary.

“We in the English-speaking world are actually sometimes better at looking after our borrowed words than the parents were.”

He also refers to the “n word” as an “insulting term” as opposed to a racial epithet.

“...the ‘l' sound that Orientals find so deeply impossible.” WTF, really? Orientals?

“Among the new words the Australians devised, many of them borrowed from the aborigines...” You mean appropriated.

“Those captured as slaves suffered not only the tragedy of having their lives irretrievably disrupted...” Irretrievably disrupted is what you say when you're talking about adopting a pet, not about the literal capture and ownership of PEOPLE.

“A second and rather harsher problem is deciding whether a person speaks English or simply thinks he speaks it.”

I really appreciate that I started this book after taking Latin lessons, because now I understand what things like participles and prefixes and even first-person singular verbs are. I appreciate it even further after learning from Bryson that some of the most ridiculous grammar rules and spellings are based on Latin, despite having nothing to do with Latin in the first place.

It's not all about the Latin, though, I'm just focusing on it because I've been learning Latin grammar this past year. In fact, I found a book full of interesting trivia, like most of Bryson's books.

Although I read some reviews from Actual Linguists slamming this book, I find Bryson's style completely readable and enjoyable and I'm happy to go along with it, knowing that if I want to know more detailed information I'm going to have to go digging for it.