Evolution of Language

We have a number of interviews on the evolution of language. Linguist and author Nicholas Ostler chooses his best books on the history and diversity of language. He discusses the prospects for not only English, but also the 96% of all spoken languages that are spoken by only about 4% of the world’s population, choosing Dying Words: Endangered Languages and What They Have to Tell Us by Nicholas Evans and The Stories of English by David Crystal. He also discusses how the production of grammars changed language (recommending La Révolution Technologique de la Grammatisation by Sylvain Auroux) and the anthropology of language development (Linguistic Diversity by Daniel Nettle).

Peter Gilliver, the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) discusses the best books on the OED, explaining that the dictionary is a dictionary “on historical principles”. It aims to tell the whole history of the evolution of the language through the story of each word. Melissa Mohr, journalist and author of Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing chooses her best books on swearing. She describes swear words as ones that are more powerful than they should be “because ‘fuck’ means the same thing as “sexual intercourse” but one is oh my God and the other is whatever.” She chooses Swearing: A Social History of Foul Language, Oaths and Profanity in English by Geoffrey Hughes and What the F: What Swearing Reveals about Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves by Benjamin K Bergen.  She also chooses The F Word by Jesse Sheidlower, which is devoted entirely to that one endlessly versatile word, and N****r: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word by Randall Kennedy, a legal scholar at Harvard, who traces the use of this word and how it has changed. Her final choice is The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature by Stephen Pinker, which has a whole chapter dedicated to swearing.