What do you think?
Rate this book
A Myriad of Tongues: How Languages Reveal Differences in How We Think
"An assured guide" (New Scientist) to the relationship between the language we speak and our perception of such fundamentals of experience as time, space, color, and smells.
We tend to assume that all languages categorize ideas and objects similarly, reflecting our common human experience. But this isn’t the case. When we look closely, we find that many basic concepts are not universal, and that speakers of different languages literally see and think about the world differently.
Caleb Everett takes readers around the globe, explaining what linguistic diversity tells us about human culture, overturning conventional wisdom along the way. For instance, though it may seem that everybody refers to time in spatial terms—in English, for example, we speak of time “passing us by”—speakers of the Amazonian language Tupi Kawahib never do. In fact, Tupi Kawahib has no word for “time” at all. And while it has long been understood that languages categorize colors based on those that speakers regularly encounter, evidence suggests that the color words we have at our disposal affect how we discriminate colors a rose may not appear as rosy by any other name. What’s more, the terms available to us even determine the range of smells we can identify. European languages tend to have just a few abstract odor words, like “floral” or “stinky,” whereas Indigenous languages often have well over a dozen.
Why do some cultures talk anthropocentrically about things being to one’s “left” or “right,” while others use geocentric words like “east” and “west”? What is the connection between what we eat and the sounds we make? A Myriad of Tongues answers these and other questions, yielding profound insights into the fundamentals of human communication and experience.
We tend to assume that all languages categorize ideas and objects similarly, reflecting our common human experience. But this isn’t the case. When we look closely, we find that many basic concepts are not universal, and that speakers of different languages literally see and think about the world differently.
Caleb Everett takes readers around the globe, explaining what linguistic diversity tells us about human culture, overturning conventional wisdom along the way. For instance, though it may seem that everybody refers to time in spatial terms—in English, for example, we speak of time “passing us by”—speakers of the Amazonian language Tupi Kawahib never do. In fact, Tupi Kawahib has no word for “time” at all. And while it has long been understood that languages categorize colors based on those that speakers regularly encounter, evidence suggests that the color words we have at our disposal affect how we discriminate colors a rose may not appear as rosy by any other name. What’s more, the terms available to us even determine the range of smells we can identify. European languages tend to have just a few abstract odor words, like “floral” or “stinky,” whereas Indigenous languages often have well over a dozen.
Why do some cultures talk anthropocentrically about things being to one’s “left” or “right,” while others use geocentric words like “east” and “west”? What is the connection between what we eat and the sounds we make? A Myriad of Tongues answers these and other questions, yielding profound insights into the fundamentals of human communication and experience.
278 pages, Kindle Edition
First published September 19, 2023
48 people are currently reading
894 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
November 17, 2023
I had enjoyed reading this book up until chapter 3, when Mr. Everett made a crucial error. When referring to terms used to describe kinship, Everett uses Mandarin to contrast the words for siblings in Karitiâna. He writes that in Mandarin, there is one word that is translatable to ‘sister’ in English, and same with brother, that do not depend on the speaker or person being referred to’s age. However, as someone who speaks a decent amount of Mandarin, I know that there are different terms dependent on age used to refer to siblings. There are different words for older sister, younger sister, older brother and younger brother, similar to Karitiâna. I fact checked with other Mandarin speakers and we don’t understand how this happened. I emailed Caleb Everett to ask where he got his information, and why our understanding is different. Unfortunately I have yet to receive a response and it seems I may not ever. I genuinely am so curious if I’m wrong. He didn’t have to reference Mandarin in contrast, so why didn’t he check that he was right? Where were the editors? Caleb, if you’re reading this PLEASE let me know.
September 29, 2023
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
I've found this book to be a humble yet fascinating experience. As a polyglot, I am well aware that language can play a crucial role in shaping and altering established sociocultural perceptions, enabling us to engage with different viewpoints and cultivate greater tolerance. However, it's important to remember that Proto-Indo-European languages represent only a portion of the linguistic diversity that exists. There are approximately 700 languages spoken in the world, and many of them are at risk of disappearing.
I was surprised by how language (and perhaps before, the environment) can ultimately influence the way we perceive the real world, from our understanding of time to the space that surrounds us. Becoming aware of these concepts has been a beautiful and profound lesson in humility for me.
I've found this book to be a humble yet fascinating experience. As a polyglot, I am well aware that language can play a crucial role in shaping and altering established sociocultural perceptions, enabling us to engage with different viewpoints and cultivate greater tolerance. However, it's important to remember that Proto-Indo-European languages represent only a portion of the linguistic diversity that exists. There are approximately 700 languages spoken in the world, and many of them are at risk of disappearing.
I was surprised by how language (and perhaps before, the environment) can ultimately influence the way we perceive the real world, from our understanding of time to the space that surrounds us. Becoming aware of these concepts has been a beautiful and profound lesson in humility for me.
September 28, 2024
I'm too old to be reading academic books anymore. It nearly killed me, but I finished it. Some interesting ideas, but I'm glad it's over.
January 24, 2024
An engaging summary about some of the current scholarship in linguistics, this volume runs through issues as diverse as how smells, and colours are described and understood, how teeth differences affect speech and how time is reflected in different ways. Everett is partly motivated by illustrating how few universals have, but the book is perhaps most fascinating when it deals with what we do, in fact, all have in common.
March 25, 2024
As a linguistic nerd, I found a lot of really interesting material in this book: ideas, studies, concepts, examples.
Sometimes I find texts like this too academic, written in that "I'm smarter than you and want you to know it, but I'm also too lazy to make my writing comprehensible" sort of way. Ridiculously long sentences. Unexplained jargon. Unnecessary five-dollar words. Caleb Everett did not fall into this trap. The text was perfectly comprehensible.
Unfortunately, he swung too far the other way, overexplaining and repeating things. I think part of the problem was that he took too much to heart the whole "Tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them" advice. I hate that advice. I've always thought it makes for boring and condescending essays and presentations. I can understand, however, that some people feel comfortable with it. Some people need or like the repetition. I agree it can be a good practice (if done with enough subtlety or imagination) for hour-long presentations or long chapters or entire books. But this is terrible advice for paragraphs. Yet over and over, Everett would tell us, for example, what a study proved. Then he would explain the study, its results, and how that proved whatever it proved. Then he would tell us what the study proved. Sometimes within one or two paragraphs. It felt very condescending. And from a story-telling point of view, it took away the suspense.
There were also a lot of places where it felt like he couldn't quite decide which version of a sentence he liked best, so he just threw them both in. Maybe the publishers needed him to pad it for word count? Who knows. But it made the reading a bit tedious.
I kept at it because he does make very interesting points with very interesting, concrete examples. I was unfamiliar with many of these languages, and I loved learning about them and the cultures of the people who speak them. I also enjoyed hearing about experimentation methods and such. I even took notes on some of it, and will use some of the "construction grammar" examples and ways of thinking when teaching my ESL classes.
Content: 4.5 stars
Not being written in an "I'm smarter than you" style: 4 stars
Being written in a "Let me overexplain" style: 3 stars.
Yes. It's a hard line to walk.
Overall enjoyment: 3.5 stars
Sometimes I find texts like this too academic, written in that "I'm smarter than you and want you to know it, but I'm also too lazy to make my writing comprehensible" sort of way. Ridiculously long sentences. Unexplained jargon. Unnecessary five-dollar words. Caleb Everett did not fall into this trap. The text was perfectly comprehensible.
Unfortunately, he swung too far the other way, overexplaining and repeating things. I think part of the problem was that he took too much to heart the whole "Tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them" advice. I hate that advice. I've always thought it makes for boring and condescending essays and presentations. I can understand, however, that some people feel comfortable with it. Some people need or like the repetition. I agree it can be a good practice (if done with enough subtlety or imagination) for hour-long presentations or long chapters or entire books. But this is terrible advice for paragraphs. Yet over and over, Everett would tell us, for example, what a study proved. Then he would explain the study, its results, and how that proved whatever it proved. Then he would tell us what the study proved. Sometimes within one or two paragraphs. It felt very condescending. And from a story-telling point of view, it took away the suspense.
There were also a lot of places where it felt like he couldn't quite decide which version of a sentence he liked best, so he just threw them both in. Maybe the publishers needed him to pad it for word count? Who knows. But it made the reading a bit tedious.
I kept at it because he does make very interesting points with very interesting, concrete examples. I was unfamiliar with many of these languages, and I loved learning about them and the cultures of the people who speak them. I also enjoyed hearing about experimentation methods and such. I even took notes on some of it, and will use some of the "construction grammar" examples and ways of thinking when teaching my ESL classes.
Content: 4.5 stars
Not being written in an "I'm smarter than you" style: 4 stars
Being written in a "Let me overexplain" style: 3 stars.
Yes. It's a hard line to walk.
Overall enjoyment: 3.5 stars
November 6, 2023
Although the subtitle promises a look at "How Languages Reveal Differences in How We Think," the author is far more interested in the languages themselves—particularly the Karitiâna language of the Amazon that he knows well—than in the differences in human experience that they may reflect. Despite a more engaging style than an academic author usually has at his command, this remains a somewhat dry tome disinclined to speculation of how language intersects with consciousness. The Whorf hypothesis, which I would think would influence vast sections of a book like this (whether positively or negatively), doesn't even rate an index entry. "I have no wish to revisit this hypothesis, nor the many debates it has sparked...in fields like linguistics, anthropology, and philosophy." Yes, it's certainly a hot-button topic. But it leaves the author in the position of an expert on evolution who refuses to discuss competing theories of natural selection. Bottom line: this book is too much the product of a scientific linguist, unwilling to speculate where data is missing or confusing.
November 10, 2025
К счастью, в последнее время влияние Ноама Хомского на научный мир в целом и на лингвистику в частности отходит на второй план, поэтому у более интересных лингвистических теорий появляется шанс хотя бы на то, чтобы их публично выдвинули. Сын лингвиста Дэниэла Эверетта Калеб Эверетт написал интересную книгу, где рассуждает о том, что языки людей гораздо более разнообразны, чем представлялось лингвистам прошлого, которые в основном делали свои выводы на основании европейских языков, носителями которых сами и являлись. В наше время «ген языка» и «особую структуру мозга, отвечающую за грамматику» Ноама Хомского и его последователя Стивена Пинкера всерьёз больше уже никто не рассматривает, но теперь, похоже, настало время развенчать ещё один лингвистический миф: попытку свести языки к совокупности грамматики и лексики. Взамен этим теориям выдвигается теория конструкций.
Впечатляющие примеры, богатый материал, интересно читать.
Впечатляющие примеры, богатый материал, интересно читать.
March 24, 2025
Super interesting insights on the diversity of languages and how it is connected to various factors, from the weather to diets to culture. I also love how the author highlights the novel research methodology that allows them to gain - the growing database and computational power that allows for more quantitative analysis to augment the traditional qualitative fieldwork, as well as the interesting experiment setups for teasing out different nuances in human's cognition. As an ESL speaker, I'm aware that this book only covers the tip of the iceberg of how difference in languages affect how we think, but it does a good job giving a sense that there is much more beyond it and provides a great starting point for discussion.
February 13, 2025
Would agree w other reviewers that recommend reading the first three chapters and stopping. This is going to sound trite but many many years ago (I was a child!) I watched the Star Trek episode about a humanoid species that only spoke in metaphors and how this came into being and shaped them culturally. That’s still the most profound insight into comparative linguistics I’ve come across. This adds some very interesting details to that set of ideas but the authors theorizing about that snd the origins of language are hm….
June 14, 2025
Some good stuff, some very good stuff, but like someone once said about a musical performance leaning heavily on homage: 'The new was not very good and the good not very new'. And the book is a bit academic and a bit slow, for a lover of books on language there just was not enough good new stuff and its delivery was tantalizing slow. For lovers of even more about the 'great eskimo vocabulary hoax' the book begins quit good, but it never gets the informative swing of Steven Pinkers 'On language'
December 25, 2023
Get ready to blow ur brains out, nothing is like you thought it was. Can you even think of a “smell word”??
February 12, 2024
About 2/3 of the book is about unknown tribes whose language really doesn't make a difference. The last third of the book really picks up when it discusses common and languages commonly used today. I liked that part!
October 12, 2025
Super-fascinating!
In the arguments over whether the languages we speak affect our cognition and our thinking, Everett breaks new ground.
I love his back story of carrying on his father's work.
In the arguments over whether the languages we speak affect our cognition and our thinking, Everett breaks new ground.
I love his back story of carrying on his father's work.
August 10, 2024
An interesting book, but I had to mark it down a bit because of the author's need to divide groups into WEIRD and non-WEIRD.
December 16, 2025
3/5
I'm a huge fan of linguistics and cognitive linguistics, and have always been fascinated by linguistic research and specifically the Whorf hypothesis, so I was immediately drawn to this book.
The writing was solid and easy to understand, which is great for a quick non-fiction read like this one. I found that my enjoyment of the book depended greatly on how well I could follow the case studies, and how well Everett tied the case study to the theme of the chapter and/or the book. Sometimes, the case study and the point being made was incredible, something that I was so excited to learn about I'd run off to my friends and tell them immediately. Other times, the point being made wasn't particularly interesting to me, especially when it didn't tie to what I looked forward to learning about most from this book, AKA how the language we speak affect how we think. Overall though, the case studies and examples Everett gave were very interesting. Sometimes, though, I feel like he kept repeating ideas over and over again, to a noticeably repetitive degree which I sometimes disliked (but one of my pet peeves is constant repetition).
One final thing I liked was Everett's comments on the past, present, and future of linguistic research, which he wraps up well in the conclusion -- the importance of studying and maintaining non-WEIRD languages, the massively important additional of computer science/ statistics to linguistics, and the importance of field work and person-to-person interaction when studying languages.
Some of my favorite examples that caused me to genuinely drop my jaw --
- Languages influencing how people perceive time (uphill/downhill, future being behind you rather than ahead of you, multiple tenses for time other than past/present/future)
- Languages affecting how well people envision the space around them (languages not having egocentric terms like left and right, people who speak languages using nonegocentric terms fundamentally seeing everything in terms of cardinal directions even when they're indoors, again uphill/downhill)
-The existence of categories for smell in other languages, much like categories for color
-Climate affecting which words exist in which languages (like how languages in hot climates are less likely to distinguish between hand and arm)
-The theory that language isn't completely arbitrary, and that the words we develop may subconsciously be tied to their meaning in some cases outside of onomatopeias (like how many languages' word for "nose" has a nasal "n" sound in it)
-The idea of phonesthemes ("Bl" for round things, "spr" for movement away from the center, "gl" for light)
-The theory that people learn languages as a series of increasinlgy specific or abstract constructions (which has helped me shift my mindset in my own language-learning!)
I'm a huge fan of linguistics and cognitive linguistics, and have always been fascinated by linguistic research and specifically the Whorf hypothesis, so I was immediately drawn to this book.
The writing was solid and easy to understand, which is great for a quick non-fiction read like this one. I found that my enjoyment of the book depended greatly on how well I could follow the case studies, and how well Everett tied the case study to the theme of the chapter and/or the book. Sometimes, the case study and the point being made was incredible, something that I was so excited to learn about I'd run off to my friends and tell them immediately. Other times, the point being made wasn't particularly interesting to me, especially when it didn't tie to what I looked forward to learning about most from this book, AKA how the language we speak affect how we think. Overall though, the case studies and examples Everett gave were very interesting. Sometimes, though, I feel like he kept repeating ideas over and over again, to a noticeably repetitive degree which I sometimes disliked (but one of my pet peeves is constant repetition).
One final thing I liked was Everett's comments on the past, present, and future of linguistic research, which he wraps up well in the conclusion -- the importance of studying and maintaining non-WEIRD languages, the massively important additional of computer science/ statistics to linguistics, and the importance of field work and person-to-person interaction when studying languages.
Some of my favorite examples that caused me to genuinely drop my jaw --
- Languages influencing how people perceive time (uphill/downhill, future being behind you rather than ahead of you, multiple tenses for time other than past/present/future)
- Languages affecting how well people envision the space around them (languages not having egocentric terms like left and right, people who speak languages using nonegocentric terms fundamentally seeing everything in terms of cardinal directions even when they're indoors, again uphill/downhill)
-The existence of categories for smell in other languages, much like categories for color
-Climate affecting which words exist in which languages (like how languages in hot climates are less likely to distinguish between hand and arm)
-The theory that language isn't completely arbitrary, and that the words we develop may subconsciously be tied to their meaning in some cases outside of onomatopeias (like how many languages' word for "nose" has a nasal "n" sound in it)
-The idea of phonesthemes ("Bl" for round things, "spr" for movement away from the center, "gl" for light)
-The theory that people learn languages as a series of increasinlgy specific or abstract constructions (which has helped me shift my mindset in my own language-learning!)
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews