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OverviewA love letter to languages, celebrating their curiosities and smashing assumptions about correct grammar An eye-opening tour for all language lovers, What Language Is offers a fascinating new perspective on the way humans communicate. from vanishing languages spoken by a few hundred people to major tongues like Chinese, and with copious revelations about the hodgepodge nature of English, John McWhorter shows readers how to see and hear languages as a linguist does. Packed with big ideas about language alongside wonderful trivia, What Language Is explains how languages across the globe (the Queen's English and Suriname creoles alike) originate, evolve, multiply, and divide. Raising provocative questions about what qualifies as a language (so-called slang does have structured grammar), McWhorter takes readers on a marvelous journey through time and place—from Persia to the languages of Sri Lanka—to deliver a feast of facts about the wonders of human linguistic expression. Full Product DetailsAuthor: John McWhorterPublisher: Gotham Books Imprint: Gotham Books Dimensions: Width: 13.30cm , Height: 1.70cm , Length: 20.20cm Weight: 0.193kg ISBN: 9781592407200ISBN 10: 159240720 Pages: 240 Publication Date: 07 August 2012 Recommended Age: From 18 years Audience: General/trade , General Format: Paperback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: In Print  This item will be ordered in for you from one of our suppliers. Upon receipt, we will promptly dispatch it out to you. For in store availability, please contact us. Table of ContentsReviewsIf there is something [John McWhorter] doesn't do well, we won't find it in his new work, What Language Is . . . And speaking of prose style, this book is an example of the sort of writing everyone should aspire to. . . . While language is ubiquitous, written ones are a minority. This book is a reason to consider ourselves fabulously fortunate. -- New York Journal of Books Author InformationJohn McWhorter is the author of the bestseller Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America, The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language, and four other books. He is associate professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and a contributing editor to The City Journal and The New Republic. He has been profiled in the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and has appeared on Dateline NBC, Politically Incorrect, and The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Tab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |
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