This collection of thirty short, very engaging chapters on linguistics and languages from around the world, masterfully balanced between the anecdotal and the incisive, is a genuine prize for scholars and beginners and will surely whet the appetite of anyone contemplating learning a foreign language or seeking deeper insights into the workings of language.

Chapters include:

Speech and the Brain: We Know What We Don't Know; First writings. Sumerian; The Baby Linguist: Genius in the Crib; Music: A Universal Language?;Interpreting and Translating;Sign Language; Machine translation; Language History; The Lingua Franca;Whistled Languages; Language, Thought, and Reality; Pidgins and Creoles;Astrolinguistics, Endangered Languages;Language Engineering: China;Italian;Black English;Appalachia;Beautiful Basque (Euskara);Vietnamese;Quechua;Korean;Filipino: Expanded Tagalog; Arabic; Chinese; Esperanto;Spanish and Portuguese;Ukrainian;Learning Another Language