Linguistics

The author of the widely praised Wordslut analyzes the social science of cult influence: how cultish groups from Jonestown and Scientology to SoulCycle and social media gurus use language as the ultimate form of power....

Learn how a single tongue spoken 150,000 years ago evolved into the estimated 6,000 languages used around the world today....

In Made in America, Bryson de-mythologizes his native land....

A brash, enlightening, and wildly entertaining feminist look at gendered language and the way it shapes us, written with humor and playfulness that challenges words and phrases and how we use them....

In this classic, the world’s expert on language and mind lucidly explains everything you always wanted to know about language....

In The Stuff of Thought, Steven Pinker marries two of the subjects he knows best: language and human nature. The result is a fascinating look at how our words explain our nature....

Perhaps Dickens' ultimate vision of a dark, macabre London and the corrupting power of money....

Stalky & Co. is a book, published in 1899 by Rudyard Kipling, about adolescent boys at a British boarding school. It is a collection of linked short stories....

Linguists have been studying Black English as a speech variety for years, arguing to the public that it is different from Standard English, not a degradation of it. Yet false assumptions and controversies still swirl around what it means to speak and sound "Black"....

A classic since its first publication in 1863, The Water-Babies is the story of a little chimney sweep named Tom and his magical adventures beneath the waves.....

This ambitious and provocative new book offers an impassioned look at reading....

The dream of a universal translation device goes back many decades, long before Douglas Adams's fictional Babel fish provided this service in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy....

The Hairy Ape (1922) is an expressionist play by Eugene O'Neill. The protagonist, Yank, yearns for a sense of belonging in a world he perceives as being controlled by the rich....

The charming novel of an orphaned newspaper seller who asks nothing of the world except to "be square". The book presents a vivid description of American life in 1914....

In this unique new history of the world's most ubiquitous language, linguistics expert David Crystal takes us along the winding byways of language via the rude, the obscure, and the downright surprising....

Benny Lewis is the creator of www.fluentin3months.com, the largest language learning blog in the world....

Because Internet is for anyone who's ever puzzled over how to punctuate a text message or wondered where memes come from. It's the perfect book for understanding how the internet is changing the English language and why that's a good thing....

Only once in a great while does a writer come along who defies comparison - a writer so original he redefines the way we look at the world...

From the author of Proust and the Squid, a lively, ambitious, and deeply informative epistolary book that considers the future of the reading brain and our capacity for critical thinking, empathy, and reflection as we become increasingly dependent on digital technologies....

Daniel Everett, then a Christian missionary, arrived among the Pirahã in 1977 - with his wife and three young children - intending to convert them....