The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language

The Power of Babel is really a well-written and engaging book about language and how it changes, a judgment echoed by many other reviewers. However, I expected it to be a history of the development of language, from the first one to the major language families to the currently spoken ones. Indeed, it has some of it, but it's not its major focus: ultimately, The Power of Babel is about more basic concepts, like what's really a "language" and how languages change with time and mix with one another. It's more about the basic mechanisms that propel languages through history than the history of the changes themselves. And it's quite good at that.

That it mismatched my expectations was not a big problem: as I am quite interested in language (in general) and languages, the book was indeed much fun to read. So, I assume, it should be for other language buffs out there. But some people may get disappointed, as it seems to be the case for some other reviewer.

It also didn't bother me that the text is sprinkled with pop references and jokes; I rather liked it, even if I didn't get some of them by virtue of not having grown in the USA. The text is agile and quite pleasant to read. Furthermore, it has very curious and interesting tidbits about English and French, e.g., I found in Mcwhorter's book why in French you use two words (ne and pas) for negation, something none of my French teachers told me.

So if you are interested in language, I'd seriously recommend this book, even if it's not a history of language development. Rather, it's quite more general than that, but with a great many examples of language change and evolution from all around the world. All that, and it's quite fun to read.

As a graduate student of historical linguistics, I often find myself asked to explain aspects of contemporary language change or the reconstruction of proto-languages to interested friends or family. Unfortunately, I don't have much of a gift of simplifying the field for average people, and I've longed for a simple introduction that I could recommend. I was very happy to discover John McWhorter's THE POWER OF BABEL: A Natural History of Language, which introduces historical linguistics, squashes myths about language change all too common among the public, and shows the wonderful diversity of human tongues all in an easily approachable way. McWhorter's book often succeeds, but I was troubled by some errors. This review is mainly meant towards fellow professionals also looking for a book they may give to interested acquaintances.

McWhorter's book consists of seven chapters and an epilogue. The first, "The First Language Morphs into Six Thousand New Ones", explains sound change and grammaticalization, the key processes of language evolution, mainly using French and English examples. In chapter 2, "The Six Thousand Languages Develop into Clusters of Sublanguages", McWhorter introduces the concept of "dialects", showing that within any given speech community there is a wealth of variants, mutually intelligible but excitingly diverse. Chapter 3, "The Thousands of Dialects Mix with One Another" discusses lexical borrowing, while Chapter 4, "Some Languages Are Crushed to Powder but Rise Again as New Ones" is about the most extreme case of language mixing, pidgins and creoles. Here the example pidgin is Russenorsk, that curious mix of Russian and Norwegian that don't deserve the obscurity into which it has fallen.

Chapter 5, "The Thousands of Dialects of Thousands of Languages All Developed Far Beyond the Call of Duty" is important. Here McWhorter explains the seemingly unnecessary features languages may take on, such as grammatical gender and complicated verbal inflections. He makes the important point that the shape of a language says nothing about the intelligence of the people who speak it, that a language serves its community perfectly well. Chapter 6, "Some Languages Get Genetically Altered and Frozen" is about the rise of standard languages out of writing. The final chapter is the most depressing, for "Most of the World's Languages Went Extinct" is about language death.

An epilogue, "Extra, extra! The Language of Adam and Eve" attempts to debunk the notions that a Proto-World can be constructed, which tend to appeal to the general public even though they lack any scientific basis. McWhorter devastatingly dismisses the work of e.g. Merrit Ruhlen and, in his darker hours, Joseph Greenberg, to the great applause of this reader.

Many readers have found fault with two aspects of McWhorter's book. The first is the humourous tone he adopted in trying to make the heady details of historical linguistics appealing for those without training. He makes reference to a massive amount of sitcoms and comic books, sometimes makes use of McDonald's advertising as an example of international language contact, and likes to phrase things in a clever manner. I found this unobjectionable, for McWhorter has a very similar sense of humour to my own. However, what is objectionable are the factual errors that pop up in the book. Other reviewers have mentioned some, but for the one I found most annoying, I'll throw in McWhorter's claim that Russian has borrowed from Old Church Slavonic, "based on Bulgarian". Well, Old Church Slavonic was based on the Slavonic dialect of Thessaloniki, outside the Kingdom of Bulgaria (and some notable OCS manuscripts have no connection at all to Bulgaria), and furthermore Russian didn't borrow from OCS, but rather from a later language called Church Slavonic (I don't see any yers in these borrowed words, do you?). One wonders if the book was reviewed by other members of the linguistics community before publication, or if the publisher just assumed that with a popular audience it could just throw it out there.

THE POWER OF BABEL is, as far as I know, the only book that gently explains concepts of historical linguistics to the laymen, at the same time debunking various myths of language superiority or great Eskimo vocabularies. It's worth checking out, in spite of its faults.

McWhorter writes an unexpectedly pleasant style for an academic. His theory is intriguing and well explained. In fact, he has challenged many of my assumptions about language and has provoked me to wonder whether I have been far too critical of non-standard dialects of my own language. I recommend this book to anyone interested in the history of human language.

If language drives you crazy, if you find yourself comparing words across European languages while reading random train schedules abroad, or defending the legitimacy and grammatical coherency non-standard dialects, or just generally devoting too much time to translating verb tenses, this book is great. Even if you do not have any interest in linguistics (yet), read this book. Read Steven Pinker's as well "The Language Instinct" and you might well be bit by the bug and major in it like I did.

The style is very simple, and though I knew much of what the author covered, I thoroughly enjoyed the examples from so many different languages. Language contact and variation are my two particular favorite topics in linguistics, and I look forward to the day the Army will let me out so I can devote a few more years to full-time study. A slight obsession for me.

This book might have been deadly dull if anyone but John McWhorter had written it. He carries the reader along by the sheer force of his delight in the subject and in all things popular or cultural, whence arrive his anecdotal examples that pepper the narrative and make it zesty. John McWhorter makes linguistics fun!