Editions

Mother Tongue

  • Imprint: Penguin

  • Published: 01/10/2009

  • ISBN: 9780141040080

  • Length: 288  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 18mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 202g

  • RRP: £9.99

Mother Tongue

Bill Bryson

'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.

  • Imprint: Penguin

  • Published: 01/10/2009

  • ISBN: 9780141040080

  • Length: 288  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 18mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 202g

  • RRP: £9.99

More from this author

About the Author

Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson’s bestselling travel books include The Lost Continent, A Walk in the Woods and Notes from a Small Island, which in a national poll was voted the book that best represents Britain. His acclaimed book on the history of science, A Short History of Nearly Everything, won the Royal Society’s Aventis Prize as well as the Descartes Prize, the European Union’s highest literary award. He has written books on language, on Shakespeare, and on his own childhood in the hilarious memoir The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. His last critically lauded bestseller was At Home: a Short History of Private Life: his new book One Summer: America 1927 is published in September 2013. He was born in the American Mid-West, and lives in the UK. Visit his website: www.billbryson.co.uk

Bill Bryson

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Bill Bryson’s source notes for At Home and One Summer

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Extracts

The Road to Little Dribbling by Bill Bryson

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