A spot-on guide to how and why Americans have become so bloody keen on Britishisms--for good or ill

The British love to complain that words and phrases imported from America--from French fries to Awesome, man!--are destroying the English language. But what about the influence going the other way? Britishisms have been making their way into the American lexicon for more than 150 years, but the process has accelerated since the turn of the twenty-first century. From acclaimed writer and language commentator Ben Yagoda, Gobsmacked! is a witty, entertaining, and enlightening account of how and why scores of British words and phrases--such as one-off, go missing, curate, early days, kerfuffle, easy peasy, and cheeky--have been enthusiastically taken up by Yanks.

After tracing Britishisms that entered the American vocabulary in the nineteenth century and during the world wars, Gobsmacked! discusses the most-used British terms in America today. It features chapters on the American embrace of British insults and curses, sports terms, and words about food and drinks. The book also explores the American adoption of British spellings, pronunciations, and grammar, and cases where Americans have misconstrued British expressions (for example, changing can't be arsed to can't be asked) or adopted faux-British usages, like pronouncing divisive as divissive. Finally, the book offers some guidance on just how many Britishisms an American can safely adopt without coming off like an arse.

Rigorously researched and documented but written in a light, conversational style, this is a book that general readers and language obsessives will love. Its revealing account of a surprising and underrecognized language revolution might even leave them, well, gobsmacked.

From the co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, a captivating portrait of contemporary New York City through six speakers of little-known and overlooked languages, diving into the incredible history of the most linguistically diverse place ever to have existed on the planet

Half of all 7,000-plus human languages may disappear over the next century and--because many have never been recorded--when they're gone, it will be forever. Ross Perlin, a linguist and co-director of the Manhattan-based non-profit Endangered Language Alliance, is racing against time to map little-known languages across the most linguistically diverse city in history: contemporary New York. In Language City, Perlin recounts the unique history of immigration that shaped the city, and follows six remarkable yet ordinary speakers of endangered languages deep into their communities to learn how they are maintaining and reviving their languages against overwhelming odds. Perlin also dives deep into their languages, taking us on a fascinating tour of unusual grammars, rare sounds, and powerful cultural histories from all around the world.

Seke is spoken by 700 people from five ancestral villages in Nepal, a hundred of whom have lived in a single Brooklyn apartment building. N'ko is a radical new West African writing system now going global in Harlem and the Bronx. After centuries of colonization and displacement, Lenape, the city's original Indigenous language and the source of the name Manhattan (the place where we get bows), has just one fluent native speaker, bolstered by a small band of revivalists. Also profiled in the book are speakers of the Indigenous Mexican language Nahuatl, the Central Asian minority language Wakhi, and the former lingua franca of the Lower East Side, Yiddish.

A century after the anti-immigration Johnson-Reed Act closed America's doors for decades and on the 400th anniversary of New York's colonial founding, Perlin raises the alarm about growing political threats and the onslaught of killer languages like English and Spanish. Both remarkable social history and testament to the importance of linguistic diversity, Language City is a joyful and illuminating exploration of a city and the world that made it.

An essay in origins ... as theoretical as Hawking and Gorst in trying to see into the deep past. McWhorter is a clear and witty writer.-- Harper's

In the first book written for the layperson about the natural history of language, linguistic professor John McWhorter ranges across linguistic theory, geography, history, and pop culture to tell the fascinating story of how thousands of very different languages have evolved from a single, original source in a natural process similar to biological evolution.

There are approximately six thousand languages on Earth today, each a descendant of the tongue first spoken by Homo sapiens some 150,000 years ago. While laying out how languages mix and mutate over time, linguistics professor John McWhorter reminds us of the variety within the species that speaks them, and argues that, contrary to popular perception, language is not immutable and hidebound, but a living, dynamic entity that adapts itself to an ever-changing human environment. Full of humor and imaginative insight, The Power of Babel draws its illustrative examples from languages around the world, including pidgins, Creoles, and nonstandard dialects.

An enlightening linguistic journey through a thousand years of feminist language--and what we can learn from the vivid vocabulary that English once had for women's bodies, experiences, and sexuality

So many of the words that we use to chronicle women's lives feel awkward or alien. Medical terms are scrupulously accurate but antiseptic. Slang and obscenities have shock value, yet they perpetuate taboos. Where are the plain, honest words for women's daily lives?

Mother Tongue is a historical investigation of feminist language and thought, from the dawn of Old English to the present day. Dr. Jenni Nuttall guides readers through the evolution of words that we have used to describe female bodies, menstruation, women's sexuality, the consequences of male violence, childbirth, women's paid and unpaid work, and gender. Along the way, she challenges our modern language's ability to insightfully articulate women's shared experiences by examining the long-forgotten words once used in English for female sexual and reproductive organs. Nuttall also tells the story of words like womb and breast, whose meanings have changed over time, as well as how anatomical words such as hysteria and hysterical came to have such loaded legacies.

Inspired by today's heated debates about words like womxn and menstruators--and by more personal conversations with her teenage daughter--Nuttall describes the profound transformations of the English language. In the process, she unearths some surprisingly progressive thinking that challenges our assumptions about the past--and, in some cases, puts our twenty-first-century society to shame. Mother Tongue is a rich, provocative book for anyone who loves language--and for feminists who want to look to the past in order to move forward.

An entertaining tour of Old English words for animals, from the author of The Wordhord: Daily Life in Old English

Many of the animals we encounter in everyday life, from pets and farm animals to the wild creatures of field and forest, have remained the same since medieval times. But the words used to name and describe them have often changed beyond recognition, starting with the Old English word for animal itself, deor (pronounced DAY-or). In The Deorhord, Hana Videen presents a glittering Old English bestiary of animals real and imaginary, big and small, ordinary and extraordinary--the good, the bad, and the downright baffling.

From gange-w fran or walker-weavers (spiders) and hasu-padan or grey-cloaked ones (eagles) to heafdu swelce mona or moon-heads (historians still don't know!), The Deorhord introduces a world both familiar and strange: where ants could be monsters and panthers could be your friends, where dog-headed men were as real as elephants, and where whales were as sneaky as wolves. The curious stories behind these words provide vivid insights into the language, literature, and lives of those who spoke Old English--the language of Beowulf--more than a thousand years ago.

A delightful journey through the weird and wonderful world of Old English, The Deorhord is a magical menagerie of new creatures and new words for the modern englisc reader to discover.

Vastly informative and vastly entertaining...A scholarly and fascinating book. --Los Angeles Times

With dazzling wit and astonishing insight, Bill Bryson explores the remarkable history, eccentricities, resilience and sheer fun of the English language.

From the first descent of the larynx into the throat (why you can talk but your dog can't), to the fine lost art of swearing, Bryson tells the fascinating, often uproarious story of an inadequate, second-rate tongue of peasants that developed into one of the world's largest growth industries.

From the co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, a captivating portrait of contemporary New York City through six speakers of little-known and overlooked languages, diving into the incredible history of the most linguistically diverse place ever to have existed on the planet

Half of all 7,000-plus human languages may disappear over the next century and--because many have never been recorded--when they're gone, it will be forever. Ross Perlin, a linguist and co-director of the Manhattan-based non-profit Endangered Language Alliance, is racing against time to map little-known languages across the most linguistically diverse city in history: contemporary New York. In Language City, Perlin recounts the unique history of immigration that shaped the city, and follows six remarkable yet ordinary speakers of endangered languages deep into their communities to learn how they are maintaining and reviving their languages against overwhelming odds. Perlin also dives deep into their languages, taking us on a fascinating tour of unusual grammars, rare sounds, and powerful cultural histories from all around the world.

Seke is spoken by 700 people from five ancestral villages in Nepal, a hundred of whom have lived in a single Brooklyn apartment building. N'ko is a radical new West African writing system now going global in Harlem and the Bronx. After centuries of colonization and displacement, Lenape, the city's original Indigenous language and the source of the name Manhattan (the place where we get bows), has just one fluent native speaker, bolstered by a small band of revivalists. Also profiled in the book are speakers of the Indigenous Mexican language Nahuatl, the Central Asian minority language Wakhi, and the former lingua franca of the Lower East Side, Yiddish.

A century after the anti-immigration Johnson-Reed Act closed America's doors for decades and on the 400th anniversary of New York's colonial founding, Perlin raises the alarm about growing political threats and the onslaught of killer languages like English and Spanish. Both remarkable social history and testament to the importance of linguistic diversity, Language City is a joyful and illuminating exploration of a city and the world that made it.

Whose language is English? Although we often think of it as native to one place, today there are many Englishes. About seventy-five countries are now using English as their official or first language, and the number of people speaking it around the world continues to rise. But the makeup of the English-speaking population is changing. The proportion of speakers for whom English is a first language, for instance, is decreasing, due to the explosion in popularity of English as a second language.

In this ambitious book, Jieun Kiaer explores the lives of English words in the twenty-first century, when the creation and use of language has become an increasingly dynamic, interactive, and diverse process in which ordinary people have taken leading roles--offering such coinages as flexitarian, MeToo, glow up, and shitizen to No sabo kids and beyond. As English language grows ever more diverse, Kiaer believes, we need a paradigm shift. We must acknowledge that all varieties of English are languages in their own right when they are used by a community of speakers. English is a language that belongs to everyone.

Considering the effects of social media, the Covid-19 pandemic, virtual work, globalization, and artificial intelligence, Kiaer paints a compelling portrait of a diffuse, rapidly evolving language characterized by creativity and democratization.

Among many other things, Babel will teach you why modern Turks can't read books that are a mere 75 years old, what it means in practice for Russian and English to be relatives, and how Japanese developed separate dialects for men and women. Dorren lets you in on his personal trials and triumphs while studying Vietnamese in Hanoi, debunks ten widespread myths about Chinese characters, and discovers that Swahili became the lingua franca in a part of the world where people routinely speak three or more languages. Witty, fascinating and utterly compelling, Babel will change the way you look at and listen to the world and how it speaks.

A New York Times Editor's Choice
An Economist Best Book of 2010
A Financial Times Best Book of 2010
A Library Journal Best Book of 2010

The debate is ages old: Where does language come from? Is it an artifact of our culture or written in our very DNA? In recent years, the leading linguists have seemingly settled the issue: all languages are fundamentally the same and the particular language we speak does not shape our thinking in any significant way. Guy Deutscher says they're wrong. From Homer to Darwin, from Yale to the Amazon, and through a strange and dazzling history of the color blue, Deutscher argues that our mother tongues do indeed shape our experiences of the world. Audacious, delightful, and provocative, Through the Language Glass is destined to become a classic of intellectual discovery.

A literate exploration of why we use--or mangle--our native tongue.--USA Today

Bill Bryson celebrates America's magnificent offspring in the book that reveals once and for all how a dusty western hamlet with neither woods nor holly came to be known as Hollywood...and exactly why Mr. Yankee Doodle call his befeathered cap Macaroni.

An assured guide (New Scientist) to the relationship between the language we speak and our perception of such fundamentals of experience as time, space, color, and smells.

We tend to assume that all languages categorize ideas and objects similarly, reflecting our common human experience. But this isn't the case. When we look closely, we find that many basic concepts are not universal, and that speakers of different languages literally see and think about the world differently.

Caleb Everett takes readers around the globe, explaining what linguistic diversity tells us about human culture, overturning conventional wisdom along the way. For instance, though it may seem that everybody refers to time in spatial terms--in English, for example, we speak of time passing us by--speakers of the Amazonian language Tupi Kawahib never do. In fact, Tupi Kawahib has no word for time at all. And while it has long been understood that languages categorize colors based on those that speakers regularly encounter, evidence suggests that the color words we have at our disposal affect how we discriminate colors themselves: a rose may not appear as rosy by any other name. What's more, the terms available to us even determine the range of smells we can identify. European languages tend to have just a few abstract odor words, like floral or stinky, whereas Indigenous languages often have well over a dozen.

Why do some cultures talk anthropocentrically about things being to one's left or right, while others use geocentric words like east and west? What is the connection between what we eat and the sounds we make? A Myriad of Tongues answers these and other questions, yielding profound insights into the fundamentals of human communication and experience.

The nine chapters of the book deal incisively with the major themes involving these languages: the classification and history of the Indigenous languages of North American, Middle American (Mexico and Central America), and South American; difficulties involving names of the languages; origins of the languages of the New World; unclassified, phantom, fake, and spurious languages in the Americas; recent hypotheses of remote linguistic relationships; the linguistic areas of the Americas; contact languages, including pidgins, lingua francas, and mixed languages; and loanwords and other new words in the native languages of the Americas.

Current scientific advances are reshaping our understanding of prehistory, offering unprecedented insights into the movements and kinship patterns of prehistoric populations. These new advances provide us with detailed information on several aspects of the early speakers of Indo-European and their lives. However, the prehistoric humans that we know through bones and potsherds were once real people speaking real languages and having specific beliefs, mythological tales and poetic expressions.

With this book, we want to apply a multidisciplinary approach that combines historical linguistics, archaeology, and comparative religion in order to improve our understanding of the early speakers of Indo-European. The book is a collection of papers by specialists in historical linguistics, archaeology and comparative religion, each examining different facets of the early Indo-European speakers, including their language, culture, and religious practices.

By the time of the Revolution, the English that Americans spoke was recognizably different from the British variety. Americans added dozens of new words to the language, either borrowed from Native Americans (raccoon, persimmon, caucus) or created from repurposed English (backwoods, cane brake, salt lick). Americans had their own pronunciations (bath rhymed with hat, not hot) and their own spelling (honor, not honour), not to mention a host of new expressions that grew out of the American landscape and culture (blaze a trail, back track, pull up stakes). Americans even invented their own slang, like stiff as a ringbolt to mean drunk. American English has continued to grow and change ever since.

The United States of English tells the engrossing tale of how the American language evolved over four hundred years, explaining both how and why it changed and which parts of the mother tongue it preserved (I guess was heard in the British countryside long before it became a typical Americanism). Rosemarie Ostler approaches American English as part of the larger story of American history and culture, starting with what we know about the first colonists and their speech. Drawing on the latest research, she explores the roots of regional dialects, the differences between British and American language use, the sources of American slang, the development of African American English, current trends in political language, and much more. Plentiful examples of the American vernacular, past and present, bring the language to life and make for an engaging as well as enlightening read.

Mary Ann Shadd Cary includes letters, newspaper articles, organizational records, and never-before-published handwritten notes and essay drafts that illustrate how Shadd Cary participated in major Africana philosophical debates during the nineteenth century. Racial uplift, women's rights, and emigration first emerged as central themes in Shadd Cary's intellectual thought during the 1850s as she grappled with slavery's effects on African Americans. She was frequently mired in controversy during this era, both for her ideas and for outspokenness as a woman. Shadd Cary's support for emigration dissipated in the 1860s. During and after Reconstruction, she advocated for citizenship and economic self-determination for Black people in general and Black women in particular. By the 1880s, Shadd Cary's writings and activism prioritized Black women's needs.

Shadd Cary shaped Black radical theory and praxis throughout her lifetime. She is one of many nineteenth-century Black women theorists whose intellectual contributions are often overlooked. By interrogating Shadd Cary's Black radical ethic of care, this book reveals the philosophies that have shaped Black women's centuries-long struggle for rights and freedom.