Dimensions
130 x 198 x 26mm
In this wonderfully entertaining and fascinating book, John McWhorter introduces us to 'the natural history of language': to its histories, its ecologies, its politics and its geographies.
Among other fascinating oddities, we encounter Russenorsk, a creole of Russian and Norwegian once spoken by Arctic traders, the ways in which Yiddish - a dialect of German - had been influenced by the grammar of Polish, and an Australian Aboriginal language which only has three verbs.