"More than 350 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to." Thus begins Bill Bryson's engaging jaunt through the quirks and byways of the world's most baffling language.

Bryson covers the entire history of language, from the first crude utterings of Neanderthal man to the explosion of English as a global language in this century. We learn why "island," "freight," and "colonel" are spelled in such unphonetic ways, and why "four" has a "u" in it while "forty" does not. We also discover that Noah Webster occasionally plagiarized and that Samuel Johnson ("Dictionary Johnson"), though no plagiarist, was often careless and inaccurate.

"MOTHER TONGUE is a book that will, like the English language itself, amuse, delight and occasionally astonish you." (Publisher's Source)