Language-related book recommendations

Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

by: Nicholas Ostler

Amazon Price: $6.02 (as of 02/17/2012)

I picked this book up at an airport before an intercontinental flight, thinking the topic seemed interesting and, to be honest, it might help me fall asleep. Well, it turns out I was 50% correct. I don't think I did anything on that flight other than eat, drink, and read this book. While its subtitle is "A Language History of the World", I'd say it would be more pertinent to say it's a world history book as rendered from the perspective of the world's languages.

This book deals with the rise, spread, and eventual fall of the world's languages (and their associated empires), spanning more than five thousand years of history in the process, beginning in Sumeria and ending with our present-day English. The author is open-minded in his reasoning and doesn't stick to just his own ideas of why and how languages spread, and the style is easy-going with plenty of entertaining anecdotes. I could not recommend a book higher than I recommend this one.

Describing Morphosyntax: A Guide for Field Linguists

by: Thomas E. Payne

Amazon Price: $39.50 (as of 02/17/2012)

I came across this book at a second-hand book fair at my university campus back in the days. The price was fairly low, and it was a bit worn. Nevertheless, it peeked my interest (and I was studying Engineering, not Linguistics or anything related at all!). This was one of only five books that I bought with me when I moved to Japan (with less than 25 kg of stuff with me in total), so as you can imagine it quickly became one of my most cherished possessions.

As its subheading makes perfectly clear, this book is meant as a guide for field linguists. A field linguist, as I understand it, is someone who goes to one of the most isolated parts of our planet, finds some people that speak a language no one has studied before, and lived with the native speakers - preferably for many years - and learns their language to fluency, then documents it.

I am certainly not a field linguist by any definition, in fact I consider myself a closet linguist, but I did find this book tremendously interesting then, and I still do now. It has helped me a lot in my practical language studies (Japanese and Chinese), because it explains linguistic concepts from the point of view that any language can be unique and different on any particular point, while at the same time properly introducing the reader to language universals that tend to be true for all languages that conform to certain criteria. If I could have only one linguistics book, then this would be it.

The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language

by: John McWhorter

Amazon Price: $7.09 (as of 02/17/2012)

I found this book after searching for books similar to the above Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World. This book too has a very punny title, so I decided to read it. What I found the most interesting in this book how the old, over-simplified model of language and their dialects, all easily fitted into a neat tree structure, is run over with a linguistic bulldozer, and replaced with a more advanced model of languages, dialects, pidgins, and creoles, all being proper entities in their own right, with complex modeling relationships between them.

This book is somewhat a mix of the above Empires of the Word and Describing Morphosyntax, in that it discusses the development and spread of language throughout the world, but it also gets down to the details of specific languages with ample examples. I think this mix is good. However, while the author is open-minded and doesn't preach his own views, he does take sides somewhat sometimes, as in insisting that there is no proto-world language, and he strongly favors spoken language over written language in his discussions. I'm alright with that though.

Language Universals and Linguistic Typology: Syntax and Morphology

by: Bernard Comrie

Amazon Price: $27.58 (as of 02/17/2012)

I bought this book after the above Describing Morphosyntax peaked my interest in the subject of how to properly describe a natural language. This book is also often referred to in the above, often in sections that I found particularly interesting, i.e. dealing with language universals - rules governing how one feature of a language implies another feature, where a counter-example has not even once been found in all the world's languages. But this book is not meant as a guide. Rather, it deals with comparison and classification of common features between languages (even seemingly completely unrelated ones), from a scientific standpoint. I found this book too to be very interesting and entertaining. Some of the relationships it showcases between languages are surprising!

The World's Major Languages

Amazon Price: $26.59 (as of 02/17/2012)

This book has been a tremendous asset for me when developing the online language identifier What Language Is This?. It contains an impressive overview of all the world's language families and the major language belonging to them. The best point of this book is that each chapter is written by an expert in its field. So it's not one person's view of all of the languages of the world, but rather a comprehensive collection of professional research. This also means that the writing style changes a lot, for both better and for worse, but overall the book is well written.

For each language discussed, phonology, morphosyntax, and writing system are presented. The writing system overviews in particular have been essential for my online language identifier since it is text based.

The only bad thing I have to say about this book is that it is focused on Indo-European languages. For my purpose of developing language identification software since most of the Internet is in Indo-European languages or Chinese or Japanese (both of which I am familiar with), this was not a really a problem, but I would still have liked it to be more evenly spaced out between the planet's continents and take number of speakers into account more than having a Western-centric view. Of the books I've recommended here, this is probably the most hard core one. But you don't have to have a PhD in linguistics to understand it, just a good closet linguist knowledge of the basics. If you want to learn all there is about every major language in the world, this book is a good place to start.