What Lanugage Is

A love letter to languages from around the globe and throughout history, celebrating their curiosities and smashing our assumptions about “correct” grammar.

An eye-opening tour for all language lovers, That Being Said offers fascinating new perspective on the way humans communicate. From vanishing languages spoken by a few hundred people to major tongues like Chinese, with copious revelations about the hodgepodge
nature of English, John McWhorter shows readers how to see and hear anguages as a linguist does.

Packed with Big Ideas about language alongside wonderful trivia, That Being Said explains how languages across the globe (the Queen’s English and Surinam creoles alike) originate, evolve, multiply, and divide. Raising provocative questions about what qualifies as a language (so-called slang does have structured grammar), McWhorter also takes readers on a marvelous journey through time and place—from Persian to the languages of Sri Lanka—to deliver a feast of facts about the wonders of human linguistic expression.

Renowned linguist JOHN MCWHORTER is the author of more than a dozen books, including the New York Times bestseller Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America and Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue. He teaches linguistics and western civilization at Columbia University, is a contributing editor at The New Republic, and has appeared widely in the media. He lives in New York.

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CONTACT: beth.parker@us.penguingroup.com