The Five-Minute Linguist: Bite-sized Essays on Language and Languages, Third Edition

by Caroline Myrick (Editor), Walt Wolfram

The 5-Minute Linguist provides a lively, reader-friendly introduction to the subject of language suitable for the general reader and beginning students. The book offers brief essays on more than 60 intriguing questions such as ""What's the difference between a language and a dialect?"" Can animals understand us?"" ""What causes foreign accents?"" and ""How is language used on social media?"" These are conveniently organized into 12 topical areas that include What is Linguistics, Language and Thought, Language and Society, and Language and Technology, among others.



Each essay is written by a leading authority in the specialization who offers succinct, insightful answers to questions that most of us have wondered about, with follow-up references to more in-depth reading on each question. The third edition adds new topics now at the forefront of linguistics and updates others, serving as an unrivaled introduction to the mysteries and intrigue of language. The third edition of this book was produced under the sponsorship of the Linguistic Society of America.

Genres: Linguistics, Nonfiction, Language

362 pages, Paperback

Published July 9, 2019

Reviews

[Cameron · Rating 3 out of 5]

Many of the concepts explored in this book would definitely be appropriate for those readers who don't have any experience with linguistics. However, for those who have any knowledge whatsoever of the subject, this book is useless. The concepts it explores are very elementary, and I therefore understand that this book would be a great resource for those who want to establish some basic knowledge of the subject. I myself have taken one linguistics class in college and have explored a little on the subject on my own, and therefore found this book to be inappropriate for someone at my limited skill level.

[Jay Lowry · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is good for getting ideas to research yourself, but don't expect to learn much more than the authors' personal viewpoints.The chapters are incredibly biased towards the authors' perspectives and often contain misleading passages and even downright incorrect statements. Oftentimes the chapters even have contradicting conclusions, where the author supports one belief with evidence and then concludes the opposite without giving an argument for it.

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Here's the thing. This isn't the most interesting book as a whole, because not every essay is interesting (to me); however, there's a lot of neat stuff in here. It's just annoying that this is the second time I've been asked to read this book for a class, which isn't a big deal. I'd just like something a big meatier at this point.

[Rene Reyes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing. Read it for a linguistics class.

[Mills College Library]

400 F5655 2019