What do you think?
Rate this book
The Story of Language
Do you think of language merely as what is spoken or written? A traffic light conveys meaning as clearly as words, and to more people.
This is a book about language - the most wonderful tool of civilization. It is designed to give the general reader the basic information about language without which he may hardly be called educated, and it does this lucidly and entertainingly.
The book is divided into six sections, each dealing with an aspect of language necessary to an understanding of the whole. First is a historical summary of the development of language from the dawn of history to the present. The next step is to examine the structure of language, how it is formed and changed, and the thing itself - sound, word, grammatical form and sentence.
An analysis of the social function of language follows, pointing up the indispensable importance of language to human activities - its importance, in other words, to the daily life of all of us. This is followed by a survey of modern spoken languages; the difficulties of the language-learning process and how they can be minimized; and finally the problem of an international language.
Mario Pei beings to this important and fascinating work a unique combination of erudition and the human approach which makes it an exciting intellectual adventure, full of interest for anyone who uses language - which is all of us.
This is a book about language - the most wonderful tool of civilization. It is designed to give the general reader the basic information about language without which he may hardly be called educated, and it does this lucidly and entertainingly.
The book is divided into six sections, each dealing with an aspect of language necessary to an understanding of the whole. First is a historical summary of the development of language from the dawn of history to the present. The next step is to examine the structure of language, how it is formed and changed, and the thing itself - sound, word, grammatical form and sentence.
An analysis of the social function of language follows, pointing up the indispensable importance of language to human activities - its importance, in other words, to the daily life of all of us. This is followed by a survey of modern spoken languages; the difficulties of the language-learning process and how they can be minimized; and finally the problem of an international language.
Mario Pei beings to this important and fascinating work a unique combination of erudition and the human approach which makes it an exciting intellectual adventure, full of interest for anyone who uses language - which is all of us.
493 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1949
20 people are currently reading
436 people want to read
About the author
Mario Andrew Pei
43 books11 followersMario Pei was Professor of Romance Languages at Columbia University.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
February 19, 2013
Fascinating account of the evolution of language. As an english speaker I learned a lot about why our spelling is so difficult and why we have roughly three times the vocabulary of other Indo-European languages. Pei writes in a lovely fashion that is not pedantic but still informative. This was a favorite of my grandmother because it celebrates language which in turns governs the expression of our most profound thoughts.
June 20, 2009
Comprehensive. Narrative. Funny. Serious. You might end up falling in love with linguistics.
September 16, 2018
This, an eminently readable survey of all the World’s languages and their characteristics, is one of the most interesting books I’ve come across.
Mario Pei (1901-1978) “was born in Rome, Italy, and immigrated to the United States with his parents in 1908. By the time he was out of high school he knew not only English and his native Italian but also Latin, Greek, and French. Over the years he became fluent in several other languages (including Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, and German) capable of speaking some 30 others, and acquainted with the structure of at least 100 of the world's languages.” (Wikipedia).
I can well believe it: the breadth of knowledge displayed in this book is quite astonishing. It is divided into five parts:
1. The History of Language
2. The Constituent Elements of Language
3. The Social Functions of Language
4. Modern Spoken Tongues
5. An International Language
The whole work, in addition to generalities, is replete with fascinating snippets: did you know that Bantu has words for “One who loses other people’s things” (mumagamagama) and “one who growls when woken up in the morning” (muwandoloci)?
I did notice a few errors on British usage (notably “Britisher” for “Briton”), but these are trivial.
Of course, this book (in its first edition, anyway) was written before Chomsky revolutionised modern linguistics, but I didn’t feel any deficiency on that basis at all.
I thoroughly recommend this to anyone with the slightest interest in the subject.
Mario Pei (1901-1978) “was born in Rome, Italy, and immigrated to the United States with his parents in 1908. By the time he was out of high school he knew not only English and his native Italian but also Latin, Greek, and French. Over the years he became fluent in several other languages (including Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, and German) capable of speaking some 30 others, and acquainted with the structure of at least 100 of the world's languages.” (Wikipedia).
I can well believe it: the breadth of knowledge displayed in this book is quite astonishing. It is divided into five parts:
1. The History of Language
2. The Constituent Elements of Language
3. The Social Functions of Language
4. Modern Spoken Tongues
5. An International Language
The whole work, in addition to generalities, is replete with fascinating snippets: did you know that Bantu has words for “One who loses other people’s things” (mumagamagama) and “one who growls when woken up in the morning” (muwandoloci)?
I did notice a few errors on British usage (notably “Britisher” for “Briton”), but these are trivial.
Of course, this book (in its first edition, anyway) was written before Chomsky revolutionised modern linguistics, but I didn’t feel any deficiency on that basis at all.
I thoroughly recommend this to anyone with the slightest interest in the subject.
July 18, 2025
Although the facts, political realities, and terminology are woefully out of date, this book still serves as an excellent introduction to Language writ large, as well as to a number of key languages and language families of the world, and the problems that face us, the speakers of those various languages.
A half century after the fact, many of Pei's predictions and observations have proven to be prescient, and many of the questions he poses are still relevant today.
From the conclusion:
"Nationalism, prejudice, superstition, unreasoning hatreds, the dead hand of tradition are like cocked pistols, pointed at the hearts of those who seek a brighter, better world. The pessimists shake their heads and say, you cannot overcome human nature! It is human nature that decrees that there shall forever be linguistic differences and difficulties, hatred and intolerance and war! [...]
"Perhaps they are right. but the world's past progress, spiritual and material, has never been achieved by the doubters. [...]
"Human nature has its bright as well as its dark side. Human nature displays in abundance heroic courage, boundless self-sacrifice, love of one's neighbor, intelligent willingness to cooperate, as well as the purely negative qualities described above. And human destiny has largely been in the past, and will be in the future, what human beings make it."
A half century after the fact, many of Pei's predictions and observations have proven to be prescient, and many of the questions he poses are still relevant today.
From the conclusion:
"Nationalism, prejudice, superstition, unreasoning hatreds, the dead hand of tradition are like cocked pistols, pointed at the hearts of those who seek a brighter, better world. The pessimists shake their heads and say, you cannot overcome human nature! It is human nature that decrees that there shall forever be linguistic differences and difficulties, hatred and intolerance and war! [...]
"Perhaps they are right. but the world's past progress, spiritual and material, has never been achieved by the doubters. [...]
"Human nature has its bright as well as its dark side. Human nature displays in abundance heroic courage, boundless self-sacrifice, love of one's neighbor, intelligent willingness to cooperate, as well as the purely negative qualities described above. And human destiny has largely been in the past, and will be in the future, what human beings make it."
October 22, 2025
This is a very interesting read, however sometimes Pei states things in what comes off as a sexist manner.
October 12, 2014
An overview written for the general reader, the book is a genuinely entertaining, systematic introduction to the cultural aspects of language with loads of interesting examples.
He tackles the puzzing dual use of ideographic and phonic symbols in Japanese: "Unlike Chinese, Japanese is an inflected language, which uses postpositions for nouns and tense and mood endings for verbs. Written Chinese, relying exclusively on word order, makes no provision for such variations in a word. The upshot was that in the ninth century, a Japanese Buddhist priest hit upon the clever device of isolating a certain number of Chinese characters and giving them an invariable phonetic value to cover all the possible syllabic combinations of the Japanese language...the next step taken was to combine the new syllabic characters with the Chinese ideograms and this method persists to the present day.
There are wonderful theme and word indices.
He tackles the puzzing dual use of ideographic and phonic symbols in Japanese: "Unlike Chinese, Japanese is an inflected language, which uses postpositions for nouns and tense and mood endings for verbs. Written Chinese, relying exclusively on word order, makes no provision for such variations in a word. The upshot was that in the ninth century, a Japanese Buddhist priest hit upon the clever device of isolating a certain number of Chinese characters and giving them an invariable phonetic value to cover all the possible syllabic combinations of the Japanese language...the next step taken was to combine the new syllabic characters with the Chinese ideograms and this method persists to the present day.
There are wonderful theme and word indices.
December 20, 2020
The book receives 2/5 stars because only 2/5s of the book was useful. The first part of the book provides an enjoyable history of Indo-European/Romantic languages with historical anecdotes with words that have remained from older cultures. The rest of the book proceeds to lists pages filled with bullet point style lists of words and the common cognates in other languages. Not very useful, especially when explanations frequently came in other languages with no attempt at explaining the dozen or so other languages cited. So unless you are familiar with an absurd amount of foreign languages, many pages are useless. To top it all off, the author spends the entire book explaining how languages have always morphed and will always morph (due to mistakes, emigrations, etc.), but proceeds to state that governments should dictate a universal language and that this universal language could be a reality in less than a hundred years! A very unattached academic work.
December 3, 2008
I read this book in college. It was one of the first books I ever read on word origins and how languarge is put together.
Mr. Pei has an clear writing style and gives good examples when speaking about language formation.
I particularly recall his discussion of the search for one universal languarge and the problems it poses.
I recommend this book as a good first text if you never read a book on language origins.
Mr. Pei has an clear writing style and gives good examples when speaking about language formation.
I particularly recall his discussion of the search for one universal languarge and the problems it poses.
I recommend this book as a good first text if you never read a book on language origins.
April 5, 2010
Interesting to read, but not all at once. Language is fun.
September 6, 2010
This is a very interesting read, however sometimes Pei states things in what comes off as a sexist manner.
Currently reading
November 10, 2010Awesome book, I'm learning a ton.
October 13, 2015
Fascinating, if a bit quaint.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews