Language History

Mankind has a distinct advantage over other terrestrial species: we talk to one another. But how did we acquire the most advanced form of communication on Earth? Daniel L. Everett, a "bombshell" linguist and "instant folk hero" (Tom Wolfe, Harper's), provides in this sweeping history a comprehensive examination of the evolutionary story of language, from the earliest speaking attempts by hominids to the more than 7,000 languages that exist today.

LONGLISTED FOR THE STELLA PRIZE 2025 'I loved it' Hannah Kent 'An instant queer classic' Benjamin Law The first love of a teenage girl is a powerful thing, particularly when the object of that desire is her best friend, also a girl. It's the kind of power that could implode a family, a...

Over 330,000 copies sold. This is the story of the church for today's listeners. Bruce Shelley's classic history of the church brings the story of global Christianity into the twenty-first century. Like a skilled screenwriter, Shelley begins each chapter with three elements: characters, setting...

In The Language of the Heart: Bill W.’s Grapevine Writings, listeners will find Bill’s initial inspirations for what became the Twelve Traditions, his battles with chronic depression and spiritual pride, memories of an all-night drinking spree, and a vivid description of how he came to organize the Twelve Steps (there were six in the first draft). For anyone in recovery from alcoholism or addiction, this uplifting and poignant collection provides a view into the early days of Alcoholics Anonymous as well as deep insights on emotional sobriety and personal struggle.

The Book of Lost Languages is part detective story, part history, part linguistic adventure. It traces the epic journeys of decipherment, from the international strife that unearthed the Rosetta Stone, key to Egypt's hieroglyphs, to the drunken wager that unsealed Old Persian, and from the malaria cure that revealed China's most ancient writing to the proof by chocolate that Mayan writing had been unlocked behind the Cold War's Iron Curtain. From earliest victories to latest findings, Harbour chronicles the remarkable mental feats that have restored forgotten worlds.

When conflicts become entrenched over generations, the language of war infiltrates everyday life, concealing destruction and hardening positions. Nowhere is this truer than in the Middle East. Award-winning author Raja Shehadeh explores the politics of language and the language of politics in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, reflecting on the walls that they create - legal and cultural - that confine today's Palestinians just like the borders, checkpoints and so-called "Separation Barrier".

Diane Johnson returns with another expatriate comedy of manners in this tale of a young dot-com executive from California who sets off for Europe to find culture, her roots, and maybe a cause to devote her considerable fortune to. When Amy checks into one of the finest small hotels in the French...

Nobel laureate and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Beloved Toni Morrison investigates Black characters in the American literary canon and the way they shaped the nation’s collective unconscious. In a dazzling series of lectures from her tenure as a professor at Princeton University, Toni...

"It's a genuine pleasure to hear spoken Latin--lots of it, and by many of the great classical authors, including Cicero, Ovid, and Virgil--and to follow the story of Gardini's lifelong infatuation with a language that is nowhere and everywhere in our modern lives... This is an audiobook to...

Daily readings drawn from every century and every tradition of the Christian faith. Christianity through the ages... Ignatius, C.S. Lewis, John Calvin, Augustine, Catherine of Siena, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, Polycarp, John Wesley, Karl Barth, and Billy Sunday. These names, and so many others, fill the pages of church history. Yet they remain strangers to most of us. How Great Is Our God will introduce you to Christianity’s most influential thinkers from every century and every tradition—modernized for today’s reader.

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST From the acclaimed author of My Cat Yugoslavia: a stunning, incandescent new novel that speaks to identity, war, exile, love, betrayal, and heartbreak The death of head of state Enver Hoxha and the loss of his father leave Bujar growing up in the ruins of Communist...

From a writer “whose genre-jumping refusal to be pinned down [makes him] an exemplar of our era” (NPR), a new book that confirms his power to astound readers. As a child Geoff Dyer spent long hours making and blotchily painting model fighter planes. So the adult Dyer jumped at the chance of...

What is poetry? If music is sound organized in a particular way, poetry is a way of organizing language. It is language made special so that it will be remembered and valued. It does not always work - over the centuries countless thousands of poems have been forgotten. This little history is about some that have not. John Carey tells the stories behind the world’s greatest poems, from the oldest surviving one written nearly four thousand years ago to those being written today. Carey looks at poets whose works shape our views of the world.

Within this essay, Orwell criticises the 'ugly and inaccurate' written English of his time and examines the connection between political orthodoxies and the debasement of language. The essay focuses on political language, which, according to Orwell, 'is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind'. Bad English, he believed, was a vehicle for oppressive ideology.

Improve your Spanish, and expand your vocabulary with topics that matter. When it comes to mastering a foreign language, listening around your interests makes all the difference. But finding books designed for language learners can be hard! This book fixes that. For the first time, you’ll learn to improve your Spanish while listening about the history of World War II.

Brought to you by Penguin. Most of us give little thought to the back of the book - it's just where you go to look things up. But here, hiding in plain sight, is an unlikely realm of ambition and obsession, sparring and politicking, pleasure and play. Here we might find Butchers, to be avoided...

A simple foreign phrase book? Che pizza! Speak the World: Italian teaches you the language and so much more. Margherita Berti, the talented linguist behind the wildly popular Italian Matters (5M+ followers!), shares her love for the language, culture, and history of Italy. In bocca al lupo!...

In this incisive blend of personal narrative and philosophical inquiry, journalist and activist Barrett Holmes Pitner seeks a new way to talk about racism in America. Can new language reshape our understanding of the past and expand the possibilities of the future? The Crime Without a Name...

What happens to Queen Bees and Wannabes when they grow up? Even the most well-adjusted moms and dads can experience peer pressure and conflicts with other adults that make them act like they’re back in seventh grade. In Queen Bee Moms & Kingpin Dads, Rosalind Wiseman gives us the tools to...

James Gleick, the author of the best sellers Chaos and Genius, now brings us a work just as astonishing and masterly: a revelatory chronicle and meditation that shows how information has become the modern era’s defining quality—the blood, the fuel, the vital principle of our world. The...