To focus on the languages I know best out of those he discusses—Irish, Hiberno-English, and French—is to make me sigh heavily. Bryson's book on the English language is a compendium of linguistic trivia interspersed with the author's biased and misinformed musings on the history and features of the language.

Mother Tongue is a series of essays on the origins of human language, with plenty of interesting scientific insights, then to the messy origins of English amid the various waves of invasions of the original Celtic peoples of Britain by Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Normans, Scandinavians (Vikings), and so forth, to its growing status as a global language.So that's when the whole book fell apart for me, because if he couldn't get this part right, what other things might he have been wrong about?

This is most unfortunate, as the topic is fascinating and the writing is witty, though sometimes angry; English is also emotive! Then again, he seems to think that Pennsylvania Dutch is a form of pidgin English, so perhaps that’s unsurprising! had committed 672 murders in the name of linguistic and cultural independence" (p35) is rather particular, to say the least. I think the lesson here is that as a linguist, I should not be reading popular writings about language.His new book The Body: A Guide for Occupants was shortlisted for the Royal Society Science Book Prize and is an international bestseller. I'm a longtime fan of Bill Bryson, but I had never read this early nonfiction work of his and was delighted to see that my library had a copy of the audiobook. With his boundless enthusiasm and restless eye for the absurd, this is his astonishing tour of English. What he does is to throw out titbits (or tidbits in the US, as they the consider the former spelling risque - so Bryson tells me) of information, some useful, some useless, some bizarre: but all fascinating.

His next book, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, is a memoir of growing up in 1950s America, featuring another appearance from his old friend Stephen Katz. More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to…’Only Bill Bryson could make a book about the English language so entertaining. All of this makes me question all the other "facts" I don't know anything about, I simply don't know if I've learned more about them from reading this book. We are experiencing delays with deliveries to many countries, but in most cases local services have now resumed. My one complaint is that, despite being loosely hung on British and American history, for the most part the book lacks a greater structure and ends up reading like a series of interesting facts.

With its in-text references, footnotes, extensive bibliography and index, this book looks almost academic, but Bryson, an American living in England, handles it all with a cheerfully low-key sense of humor -- almost as if Terry Pratchett had turned his eye to grammar -- and even a refreshingly open approach to the word fuck in the chapter on swearing.