You'll Never Look at Languages the Same Way Again

This is a course that explained how languages are divided into multiple families, and how they evolve over time. It is as much a history course as it is a linguistics course. It looks at how languages are born, change, merge, and die away. It dedicates a large chunk of its time on dialects and explains their relation to the "proper" version of their language. It is a very rich course, possibly one of the best value courses I've come across. Here's a list of the lectures in this course:

1 What Is Language?
2 When Language Began
3 How Language Changes—Sound Change
4 How Language Changes—Building New Material
5 How Language Changes—Meaning and Order
6 How Language Changes—Many Directions
7 How Language Changes—Modern English
8 Language Families—Indo-European
9 Language Families—Tracing Indo-European
10 Language Families—Diversity of Structures
11 Language Families—Clues to the Past
12 The Case Against the World’s First Language
13 The Case For the World’s First Language
14 Dialects—Subspecies of Species
15 Dialects—Where Do You Draw the Line?
16 Dialects—Two Tongues in One Mouth
17 Dialects—The Standard as Token of the Past
18 Dialects—Spoken Style, Written Style
19 Dialects—The Fallacy of Blackboard Grammar
20 Language Mixture—Words
21 Language Mixture—Grammar
22 Language Mixture—Language Areas
23 Language Develops Beyond the Call of Duty
24 Language Interrupted
25 A New Perspective on the Story of English
26 Does Culture Drive Language Change?
27 Language Starts Over—Pidgins
28 Language Starts Over—Creoles I
29 Language Starts Over—Creoles II
30 Language Starts Over—Signs of the New
31 Language Starts Over—The Creole Continuum
32 What Is Black English?
33 Language Death—The Problem
34 Language Death—Prognosis
35 Artificial Languages
36 Finale—Master Class

470 people found this helpful

Hanging on every word

After a couple of mediocre listens I was very pleased to discover this real treasure trove of an audiobook. I don’t suppose this would be a book for everyone. To enjoy it, you probably need to have a passion for and a curiosity about language, as I do.

At the beginning of this lecture series the narrator discusses the origins of language as it came into being from the mouths of our distant ancestors, and at this stage he mentions that, possibly, Neanderthals weren’t able to speak because of the positioning of their larynx compared to early humans. I was slightly concerned about this assertion because I know that a lot of recent genetic discoveries have been made about the Neanderthals and it is generally believed that Neanderthals probably did talk, and so I started to wonder if this lecture series was old and outdated. I listened to a similar Audible lecture series recently and was disappointed to discover that it was recorded in the 90s. So I was relieved when the narrator mentioned that this series dates from 2004. It isn't smack up-to-date, but it is reasonably current. He also mentions Steven Pinker’s brilliant book ‘The Language Instinct’ (available on Audible, and highly recommended), and I was relieved that this lecture series postdates Pinker’s influential work.

So the author explains lots of concepts about language from various perspectives, and he does this in a very entertaining and amusing style. I learnt lots of good stuff. There are far too many to list, but here is one example: We have a conception that languages in ‘undeveloped’ societies, such as those of isolated Amazon hunter-gatherers, would be grammatically simple, whilst a highly developed language, such as English, would be much more complex. But the opposite is true. A language left to ‘evolve’ in isolation amongst only a small number of speakers tends to become intricate and complicated. In contrast, languages such as English have at various times in the past been learned by dominant settlers (e.g. Vikings). When these Vikings acquired English they learned it as a second language (children are good at learning a second language, but adults tend to struggle with this), and in so doing they simplified it by speaking a kind of Pidgin English, removing most article genders, verb declensions and noun cases.

And because they were the dominant people at this time, their simplified reinterpretation of the English language replaced (or at least modified) the existing one. I love the idea of some big dumb Viking making a really bad job of picking up the local language, like a modern delinquent English tourist ordering lager on Holiday in Spain, and then, hundreds of years later, the effect of this is that English, the global mega-language, is more economical and straightforward thanks to the Viking simplifications.

The audiobook is chock-full of interesting points like the above (I find this stuff interesting, but I confess I am a word geek who enjoys crosswords and Scrabble). If you find language interesting then I think you will love it too.

213 people found this helpful

Fascinating!

This was one of the most fascinating lecture series I've ever listened to. (But then I am a bit of a grammar geek.) Did you know that the "pas" in the "ne pas" of French comes from the word "step"? As in "No, I'm not going, not a single step"?

These lectures are thick with this kind of lore. They're also peppered with Professor McWhorter's personal anecdotes about the languages he's studied and the native speakers he's known. But it's not all trivia and party chat -- there are extensive sections on the variety of grammars, on written vs non-written languages, on creoles vs pidgins, and an interesting (if gloomy) assessment of attempts to revive dying languages.

I can't say this series changed my life, but it certainly has changed how I think about culture and communication.

160 people found this helpful

Dangerous and misleading

I bought this audiobook in part based on the many positive reviews here. I now know that these reviews for the most part are written by people who knowing little about the subject were impressed with the author's tidbits.

As someone who has devoted much of my life to the study of language, is a polyglot and who is an author of a well known Mandarin Chinese language course, I found this book very frustrating to listen to.


There is so much to be gained from hearing him especially if you are not familiar with the overall field of linguistics.

However, there are so many flaws in the book that several times I almost wanted to stop and forever erase it from my library.

McWhorter is in love with himself. His vanity allows him to often make jokes that detract from his teaching and frequently subvert it. He wants us to accept his personal biases and opinions as fact and uses humor to mock whatever he wishes. He will make up "facts" and later add, Just kidding. Once is funny. Often is not.

His pedantry, obnoxious narcissism, sophomoric humor, pathetic attempts at wisdom make this book pure torture for anyone who knows even a little about linguistics.

He has many opinions which he masks as fact. He pretends to give a balanced review of linguistics but in fact fails to do so.

For example, he makes a point of attacking the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis which states that the way people think is strongly affected by their native languages. His initial proof that this is invalid is that Whorf was not a PhD linguist. The fact that Whorf did more to contribute to the field, without any funding, than the author and most of his buddies combined, escapes him. Sapir, Whorf's colleague, was an American anthropologist-linguist, who is widely considered to be one of the most important figures in the early development of the discipline of linguistics. The author ignores that this towering figure co-sponsored this approach. He knows that he would not be able to attack his credentials.

He brings up many points to attack the theory and then, reluctantly, adds several to support it.

He has devoted an entire book to attacking this approach and is not subtle in including his pet peeve as fact in this book.

Towards the end of this book he indicates here and there that this theory has a lot more going for it than his earlier put down would have let one believe. By then, however, the damage has been done.

I was astonished to listen to this linguist make false statements about languages that I know quite well such as Chinese. He often remarks that the vocabulary of Chinese consists of single syllables. This is false. While individual characters are single syllables these syllables are usually combined to make words.

He refers to Yiddish, another language I have devoted much of my life to, as a type of German. It is no more a variant of German than another Germanic language such as Swedish. Earlier he includes Yiddish as a Germanic language and later downgrades it.

He says he is a specialist in Creoles and Black English, which he has written an entire book on. So near the end of this book he devotes quite a bit of time to these two topics to a degree that is almost mind numbing.

I could go on but you get my point.

This book is marred by the author's vanity, ignorance and refusal to adhere to the higher road of teaching and professionalism.

I wish that I could find another audio presentation of the subject.

82 people found this helpful

John McWhorter is simply amazing!

Who would thought an audiobook on language could be so utterly compelling and interesting! I enjoyed the other Great Course I listened to, so I thought I would give this one a try. What a great decision on my part!

I know almost nothing about the subject nor was I ever interested in it, yet I was entertained for the entire 18 hours. What made this book so fascinating was Professor McWhorter's obvious love of his subject, Linguistics, and his wonderful, humorous, and dynamic personality. He is a pleasure to listen to--he makes a subject that could be very dry really come alive. I can certainly imagine listening to this book again.

McWhorter answers so many questions about the development of language. If you are at all like me, you may have never had any deep thoughts about language. I have only been frustrated by my difficulty in learning a foreign language. If you listen to this book, you will find out like I did just why it is so very difficult, if not impossible, to learn languages as an adult. You will learn, among other things, how languages develop and how they become extinct, why there isn't a universal language, what is the difference between a language, a dialect, and a creole. You will also be amazed at how few of the world's 6000 languages have been written down. You will most likely be very amused at the mostly unsuccessful attempts to create artificial languages, as McWhorter had such a fun time describing the musical language Solresol. No matter how boring my description sounds, McWhorter makes it all amusing and very interesting.

If you are wanting to break out of the escapism of fiction for a moment, I highly recommend this Great Course. I promise you will learn a great deal, you will be entertained, and maybe you will even be inspired to try another in the Great Courses series of audiobooks. I know I will.

81 people found this helpful

How to Learn a lot in a very short time.

Prof. McWhorter's lectures were outstanding I learned so much that I didn't know about the origins, the structure and the evolution of human language. It really opened up a whole new world on a subject I didn't even realize I was all that interested in.

I found his continuous dismissal of the effect of culture on language a little ...um... questionable, but this is his take on it, and he resides in a field that doesn't have a lot of time for cultural criticism, so that's okay. I took it on board that this is one way into the subject, and one I didn't know a lot about.

I'll never listen to dialects or accents the same way again. I'll never bemoan the eclipse of certain words in my language, or the addition of new ones I find silly again. It's language growing and changing and without it, a language dies.

Wonderful. This is a keeper. I'll be listening to it again.

54 people found this helpful

What a surprise!

Well this was a pleasant surprise! I was looking for something different from the kinds of books I had been reading, and never having tried one of these courses, decided to take a flyer. I was worried that this might be boring, like a college lecture, but I found every lecture to be informative and interesting, and the reader had just enough smart-aleck humor about him that the lectures were often funny. The series of lectures is quite long, but it's the sort of thing where one might take a break and listen to something else, then pick this one back up without getting lost; however, even though I planned to do that, I tore through these lectures like a page-turner mystery, and look forward to listening to them again.

51 people found this helpful

Couldn't Stop Listening

If you could sum up The Story of Human Language in three words, what would they be?

Fascinating, informative, surprising

What did you like best about this story?

I love that this course explained so many aspects of so many languages from all over the world. The Story of Human Language covers everything rom the evolution of tonal languages in Eastern Asia to the development of creoles in the New World, and so much more.

What about Professor John McWhorter’s performance did you like?

Professor McWhorter lectures with passion, excitement and humour. His love of language and joy of teaching really shine through.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

I couldn't turn this course off. I finished it in less than a week, and was sad when it was done.

36 people found this helpful

After 650 hours of listening, this might be my favorite

This guy is witty, engaging, and perhaps most importantly, accessible. Even when venturing into the more esoteric topics in linguistics, his delivery and organization make it an utterly digestible, enjoyable experience. Bonus: not a single thing about his voice annoyed me, and I'm the kind of guy with plenty of pet peeves who often has to forsake lectures that I find positively fascinating due to the lecturer's articulation, tonality, cadence, etc...
Download this lecture. McWhorter is truly a skilled linguist and downright talented educator. You will not be disappointed.

35 people found this helpful

Fine survey of language history

Any additional comments?

A good survey of the history of language. Perhaps a bit Euro-centric, but that seems to have been a deliberate choice to more readily engage listeners, many of whom are likely to have studied a Romance or Germanic language in high school or college.

Prof.McWhorter's delivery is natural and easy to follow, especially compared to some of the other Great Courses lectures I've listened to.

Quite a bit of overlap with his other lecture series, "Myths, Lies, and Half-Truths of Language Usage".

24 people found this helpful