Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson ~ A Book Review from Pumpjack & Piddlewick

Mother Tongue, by Bill Bryson, is the singular book I would take to a dessert island, if I was only allowed one book. Not only is it incredibly informative, full of facts, some rather obscure, but also it is extremely funny. Honest. Who knew a book on language could be funny? Not me. But then Bryson has a way with words.

I discovered Bill Bryson long before he wrote the books that made him a household author. Notes from a Small Island was the first book of his I read. I was living in the UK and it made sense to read his perspective on the UK. Honestly, there are few books that make me laugh out loud, but this was one of them. Not to mention I learned a lot about the country. Reading this inspired me to read his others. Mother Tongue came next. And became my favourite of his ever since.

So why review an ‘old’ book from a famous author? Well, I felt inspired because I am forever learning French. Note, not of the generally humourous variety. And Mother Tongue pops into my head as a more preferential language book whenever I get bored with my studies. And since it is the lesser known amongst his travel and science books, I felt it deserved a review. So, herewith…

English, Apparently, Is a Bit of a Mess

Mother Tongue is ostensibly about the etymology of the English language, in England specifically. Bryson looks at where English came from, how it developed, why it has acquired such an enormous vocabulary. And why, despite all the rules we are taught at school, it seems determined to ignore many of them.

I loved this book because Bryson makes the history of language feel like the sort of thing you might discover while having a conversation with someone who has spent far too much time looking things up. There are words that have travelled from one language to another, words that have changed meaning, words that have survived for centuries and words that have somehow ended up meaning something quite different from what they originally meant.

It is all rather chaotic, which is probably why it is so interesting.

History Hiding in Plain Sight

What I hadn’t really appreciated before reading Mother Tongue was just how much history is contained in language. I had always been interested in history and I was interested in languages, but I tended to think of them as separate subjects. Bryson rather neatly joined the two together for me.

You can look at a word and find evidence of migration, invasion, trade or cultural influence sitting inside it. English is particularly good at this because it has spent centuries borrowing from other languages. The result is a vocabulary that tells you quite a lot about the people who have spoken it and the people they encountered along the way. Rather like history itself.

That idea stayed with me. It also changed the way I thought about learning other languages. Instead of seeing vocabulary as something I simply had to memorise, I began to see it as part of a much bigger story. A French word wasn’t just a French word. There was a reason it was there. There was usually some history behind it.

Which Doesn’t Mean I Suddenly Became Good at French

I should probably make it clear that Mother Tongue did not transform me into an accomplished language learner. If only it were that easy. It didn’t give me some clever system for remembering French vocabulary or make French grammar suddenly seem straightforward. What it did do was make me much more curious about language, and that is not quite the same thing as becoming better at it.

I would come across a word and wonder where it came from. I would notice similarities between English and French and start wondering whether they were connected, which led me down the rabbit hole of cognates, those words in different languages that share a common origin and often look and sound remarkably similar. English and French have plenty of them, thanks in part to the long and complicated history between the two languages. And that, at least I can say, does help with my French.

English Has Some Explaining to Do

One of the other things I enjoy about the book is Bryson’s treatment of the English language itself. We tend to assume that our own language makes sense and that it is other languages that are full of strange rules and exceptions. English doesn’t really have much room to complain.

The spelling alone should probably have warned us. We have words that look as though they should rhyme but don’t, words with letters that have long since given up contributing to the pronunciation, and rules that seem to have been invented mainly so that subsequent generations could argue about breaking them.

Bryson has a great deal of fun with this, but there is something quite useful underneath the humour. Languages are not designed from scratch. They evolve. They absorb influences. They change because people change them, often without consciously deciding that they are doing so. Once you start looking at language that way, some of its oddities become a little less irritating. Sometimes.

My Favourite Book

I have read almost all of Bryson’s books since those first two, and I still enjoy the way he can take something that sounds as though it ought to be terribly dull and turn it into a story. But Mother Tongue retains favourite status. Perhaps because it combines so many things I enjoy: history, language, obscure facts and humour. It also reminds me that learning doesn’t always have to feel like learning, which is particularly useful when I am struggling through yet another French verb tense and wondering why I thought this was a good idea.

So, back to that desert island. If I really were allowed only one book, Mother Tongue would still be my choice. It’s a book I have reread many times. It is so full of information it needs to be reread more than once. But beyond that, there is truly something special about a book that you can read multiple times and it still feels fresh each time. I suspect I would discover something new on every reading, either because I had forgotten it, missed it the first time or had become interested in something else entirely since I last read it. On a desert island, that seems like a rather useful quality in a book. So yes, Mother Tongue would come with me. For the learning, for the laughter and for all those little linguistic rabbit holes that would keep me happily occupied until someone came to rescue me.

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