In this work, the author shares his expertise as a linguist to introduce us to Russonorsk, a creole of Russian and Norwegian once spoken by trading fur trappers in the summer, the ways in which Yiddish, a dialect of German, has been influenced by the grammar of Polish and a dialect of an Australian aboriginal language which only has three verbs. Along the way we learn how English absorbed French at two stages of its history, giving us Norman French warranty and the standard French guarantee, while Japanese has been infused with Chinese vocabulary at four distinct periods, and that Danish, Norwegian and Swedish are best regarded as three dialects of Scandinavian.

There are some 6,000 human languages. But how and why are there so many? How do languages evolve over time - and is there some original or ur-language from which they all developed? Is language fundamentally encoded in us when we are born, or completely learned? These and many other related questions are investigated in this intriguing book. McWhorter is an American Professor of Linguistics and speaks many languages. But he wears his learning lightly and wittily, and has managed to make this book both accessible and authoritative. He's especially good at teasing out how English and French are shot through with fragments of other tongues, and reflective of their only partially buried pasts.

John McWhorter is Associate Professor of Linguistics at UC Berkeley. He is the author of a book about black English The Word on the Streets.