Product Description

A unique collection of original essays by 21 of the world's leading linguists. The topics discussed focus on some of the most popular myths about language: The Media Are Ruining English; Children Can't Speak or Write Properly Anymore; America is Ruining the English Language. The tone is lively and entertaining throughout and there are cartoons from Doonesbury andThe Wizard of Id to illustrate some of the points. The book should have a wide readership not only amongst students who want to read leading linguists writing about popular misconceptions but also amongst the large number of people who enjoy reading about language in general.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #126098 in Books
• Published on: 1998-11-26
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

About the Author
Peter Trudgill and Laurie Bauer are both respected linguists. Trudgill has written many books for Penguin (including Sociolinguistics which has sold 130,000 copies since it was first published in 1974). Other contributors include Jean Aitchison (Professor of Language at Oxford), Lars Gunnar-Andersson (co-author of Bad Language with Trudgill) and Janet Holmes (Women, Men and Politeness, 1995, Longman). Peter Trudgill lives in Lausanne (and sometimes Norwich.) Laurie Bauer lives in New Zealand.

Customer Reviews

A good source of information for linguists and non-linguists
Unfortunately, linguistic research is generally inaccessible to the non-linguist and so much that is written about human language for the masses is by non-specialists who take the opportunity to air their own prejudices. This book addresses many misconceptions about language, often supported by highly reputable authors who nevertheless can be shown to know nothing about the way language works. As editor Peter Trudgill says, if you want to know about physics, you ask a physicist; and if you want to know about language you ask a linguist and not just someone who has used it successfully in the past. The chapters are written by highly competent academics who are well-known in the linguistics community, and despite their being written for lay readers, there is much here that is also relevant for linguists and students of language. Read this book to find out how all languages are equally complex, why linguistic change is inevitable, and to laugh at the rubbish newspapers print.

How to talk linguistics to non-linguistics
As a linguist, people often ask you what you do, what it entails and sometimes a heated argument will arise with people saying how rubbish US English is and why German is an awful language.

This excellent little and affordable book deconstructs all those language myths we all have in our minds and helps linguistics becoming more accessible to laypeople. Pop-linguistics books à la Bill Bryson's "Mother Tongue" are rare (perhaps a good thing) and this book, written by authorities in linguistics, will prove to be a good support for people who want to justify linguistics in their life or who wish to debunk which accent is the bestest in Britain... If you ever catch yourself quoting passages from that book to your mild-aged next-door neighbour: well done.

A study of the nature of language
Readers interested in linguistics will learn that language change can't be prevented because it is a self-regulating system which takes care of itself. All languages are capable of vocabulary expansion to deal with new areas of life their speakers need to talk about. The media, often wrongly accused of ruining a language, are actually linguistic mirrors: they reflect current language usage and extend it. Languages cannot posses good or bad qualities because no language system can ever be shown to be clearer or more logical or more beautiful or ugly than any other language system.
What about the speakers of a language? Despite the widespread belief that women talk more than men, most of the available evidence suggests just the opposite. If you want to learn a foreign language, rest assured that there are no easy or difficult languages. In fact it is not even possible to perform overall measurements of the complexity of a language. Since all human languages allow the precise communication of complex messages they all require a grammatical system. Double negatives may sound appalling in English yet they exist in many other languages. It is therefore not appropriate to think in terms of logic when looking at language use.
An accent is like a map which listeners perceive through their ears and it gives them information about where a speaker was born, what age they are, what gender, what level of education they have, how much they might weigh and whether they feel well or ill at the moment of speaking. And finally readers may be surprised to learn that in many ways - mainly lexical - American English is more conservative than British English.