Linguistics For Dummies, by Strang Burton, Rose-Marie Dèchaine, and Eric Vatikiotis-Bateson

Although one might not think that linguistics is the most obviously practical of subjects for most people, a matter discussed in this book came up today in a discussion that I was a part of about the superiority of the eye as an organ of gathering information to the ear, which relates to some of the changes in language that result from writing, which provides a fixed and visual representation of writing as opposed to the less precise auditory information that we gather from languages which have no writing systems. One of the key ironies of this book, as well as any book about the subject of linguistics, is that while learning languages verbally appears to be a fundamental and basic task that people do without any sort of formal knowledge whatsoever, the formal study of linguistics (and nearly every other subject) depends on a far less obvious skill in reading and a high degree of technical knowledge not only about the components and sounds of language but also about social dimensions and issues of how language is handled in all of its complexity by the human brain. The task of learning language (at least our first language) is a straightforward task engaged in by googooli babies and small children, but to learn about language is a far more complicated task.

Although this particularly Dummies book is likely not the most popular read, it is certainly one that I found to be generally enjoyable and worthwhile. Linguistics was not a subject I grew up formally knowing, but I came to the subject from a variety of ways: from a background spent acquiring multilingual capacity, from a love of learning vocabulary and seeking to understand the history of my own language and others, from the habit of creating languages and seeking to understand how they worked and how they changed over time. Later on, of course, I became very interested in language families and the issues of substrata and superstrata and how it is that languages diverged over time and converged through areal factors of proximity. Throughout all of these interests, I have developed a great deal of fondness for the issue of linguistics, even studying attempts to understand issues of universal grammar as well as the neurological origins of speech and efforts to understand the nature of the earliest languages that humanity spoke, and what changes we can expect to see in languages in our own present age when areal convergences exist around the entire world.

In terms of its contents, this book is organized in a way familiar for readers of the series as a whole. The book is composed of 21 chapters of material organized into six parts that take up a bit less than 350 pages of material, all of which is pretty standard for the Dummies books. The book begins with a short introduction and then moves into its first part, examining language through the lens of linguistics (I), with chapters on knowing a language as opposed to knowing what a language is (1) and communicating with language (2) through its design features. The second and largest part of the book discusses the building blocks of language (II), including phonetics, how sounds are built (3), the way phonology puts sounds together (4), how words are built through morphology (5), how sentences are created through syntax (6), how people make sense of meaning through semantics (7), and how language is used in conversation as pragmatics (8). In the third part of the book, the authors explore the social life of language (III), including sociolinguistics–how we live with language variations (9), historical linguistics–how we find family relations between languages (10), linguistic typology–how we catalogue differences between languages (11), and what language birth and death tells us about the beginning and end of languages (12). The fourth part of the book then discusses the role of the brain in language (IV), including how we learn (13), perceive (14), and produce language (15) and how we locate it in the brain through neurolinguistics (16). The next part of the book discusses how we move from speaking to writing (V), detailing the writing down of language (17) and how this changes languages (18). The last part of the book gives the usual part of tens (VI), where the authors discuss ten language myths busted by linguistics (19), ten unsolved problems in linguistics (20), and the top ten jobs for linguists (21), after which the book closes with an index.