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Mother Tongue

The Story of the English Language

'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. With his boundless enthusiasm and restless eye for the absurd, this is his astonishing tour of English. From its mongrel origins to its status as the world's most-spoken tongue; its apparent simplicity to its deceptive complexity; its vibrant swearing to its uncertain spelling and pronunciation, Bryson covers all this as well as the many curious eccentricities that make it as maddening to learn as it is flexible to use.

Bill Bryson's classic Mother Tongue is a highly readable and hilarious tale of how English came to be the world's language.

Not only fascinating but extremely funny

Angus Deayton

About Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson was born in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1951. He is the author of eighteen books and holds the record of having the most bestsellers of any author on the Sunday Times bestseller list in the last fifty years. A Short History of Nearly Everything, first published in 2003, spent 106 weeks in the chart, won both the Aventis Prize and the Descartes Prize and is the biggest-selling non-fiction book of the twenty-first century.

Bill Bryson is a former Chancellor of Durham University and is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society. He lives in England.
Details
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • ISBN: 9780141040080
  • Length: 288 pages
  • Dimensions: 197mm x 16mm x 129mm
  • Weight: 203g
  • Price: £10.99