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Language
Perhaps the single most influential work of general linguistics published in this century, Leonard Bloomfield's Language is both a masterpiece of textbook writing and a classic of scholarship. Intended as an introduction to the field of linguistics, it revolutionized the field when it appeared in 1933 and became the major text of the American descriptivist school.
580 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1933
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
June 10, 2012
I love Leonard Bloomfield and it's pretty much because of this book. Language is fun and accessible, and while some of it has not stood the test of time, a lot of it has and it is still a terrific read. Bloomfield comes across as brilliant as well as generous and he writes engagingly and clearly. I don't recommend it as an intro to linguistics because readers new to the discipline won't know what still stands from 1933 and what doesn't, but every linguist should read it. Most will really enjoy it.
January 21, 2024
Bloomfield, “A Set of Postulates for the Science of Language” (1926)
Bloomfield, Language (1933)
Hockett, “What Algonquian is Really Like” (1966)
“Clarity is no virtue; it is the most elementary of scholarly duties. Obfuscation, on the other hand, is a sin.”
--Charles Hockett
Although he spent much of his professorial career as a German Philologist, Bloomfield will be remembered most for what he did in establishing Linguistics as a science in American. He did this in two ways: (1) by drawing disciplinary boundaries around the fledgling field of linguistics, and (2) by developing a methodology for explaining linguistic phenomena in purely grammatical terms. Thus, Bloomfield banished from the arena of linguistics both psychological theorists and philosophical speculators. They had their own disciplines, after all. Yet like many a scientist before him (and like Zelig Harris and Noam Chomsky after), Bloomfield encouraged a mathematically inspired modeling of patterns of linguistic behavior.
Bloomfield also derived from the philological tradition a deep satisfaction with formal alternations (like plural -s realized as -z after voiced segments → backs vs. bagz) and with the regularity of sound change (like Latin ‘pater’ corresponding with English ‘father’ because voiceless stops (like p and t) became fricatives (like f and th) in Germanic). The case for an autonomous science of linguistics was greatly strengthened by such elegant correspondences, for these impressive regularities demonstrated not only that linguistic alternations are empirically observable but also that they cannot be explained as well with the postulates of any other discipline.
For a few decades, Bloomfield’s own delimitation of an autonomous linguistics proved to be a highly productive move. However dry mid-twentieth century linguistics might seem to the reader of today, the era was an exciting time for the development of both synchronic and diachronic grammar. But linguists were forbidden to discuss mental states, cognition, or any intuitions of meaning, for all of these had been banished to the realms of psychology and logic. In practice, this meant Bloomfield started grammatical analysis from the raw sound of the utterance, building from the ground up his interpretation of a particular language, always privileging form over meaning. Many of his analyses of phonological and morphological rules are brilliant. But somehow he never quite managed to say much of lasting value on the higher domains of glossemes and noemes, or in more modern terms, of syntax and semantics.
Bloomfield might have taught much Germanic philology, but he also studied a wider range of languages than perhaps any of his contemporaries. Bloomfield’s work on Tagalog, published over a century ago, is still regarded as the gold standard in Austronesian linguistics. And his work on Sanskrit and on four Algonquian languages (Fox, Cree, Menominee, and Ojibwa) brought to every scholar of language’s attention the ways in which languages can astonish by their ingenuity and complexity. A devout Bloomfieldian, Charles Hockett, analyzed one such ingenious and complex example, the obviation system found in many Algonquian languages. From the point of view of English, obviation is a tangle of semantic and indexical distinctions: animate/inanimate; near/far; actor/theme; direct/inverse. But Hockett managed to represent these relations in a diagram with planes, lines, points, and vectors. All very Euclidean. Yet the demonstration works surprisingly well as an explanation of the obligatory hierarchical arrangement of participants in Algonquian sentences. Through a kind of feature geometry, which ties together in a neat bundle several morphological paradigms, we learn something significant about “what Algonquian is really like.”
Being a good Bloomfieldian structuralist, Hockett devised an insightful theory of Algonquian. He did not create a theory of language in general or of all languages at once. For as Bloomfield and Hockett made plain, structural linguistics tips to the side of what Boas called historical particularism, away from the opposite pole of Saint Noam’s Universal Grammar. Each language is thus understood as the product of its own peculiar drift and development. There is no timeless essence of language which we are either headed toward or emerging from. Instead, each language has unique features to be understood in their own terms. By 1926, Bloomfield had arrived at a kind of relativist stance. It was not a Sapir-Whorf (meaning-based) relativism. Rather, Bloomfield’s relativism developed into a creed that languages will always vary formally and will inevitably contradict any purported substantive universals. As Bloomfield expressed in 1926: “Notions such as subject, predicate, verb, noun, will apply only to some languages, and may have to be defined differently for different ones,--unless, indeed, we prefer to invent new terms for divergent phenomena.” I feel this willingness to be surprised or vexed by languages radically different from our own furnishes the real basis for speaking of linguistics as an empirical science. Generativism cannot possibly account for astonishing variation if their entire apparatus (however minimal) is taken as a priori.
Bloomfield, Language (1933)
Hockett, “What Algonquian is Really Like” (1966)
“Clarity is no virtue; it is the most elementary of scholarly duties. Obfuscation, on the other hand, is a sin.”
--Charles Hockett
Although he spent much of his professorial career as a German Philologist, Bloomfield will be remembered most for what he did in establishing Linguistics as a science in American. He did this in two ways: (1) by drawing disciplinary boundaries around the fledgling field of linguistics, and (2) by developing a methodology for explaining linguistic phenomena in purely grammatical terms. Thus, Bloomfield banished from the arena of linguistics both psychological theorists and philosophical speculators. They had their own disciplines, after all. Yet like many a scientist before him (and like Zelig Harris and Noam Chomsky after), Bloomfield encouraged a mathematically inspired modeling of patterns of linguistic behavior.
Bloomfield also derived from the philological tradition a deep satisfaction with formal alternations (like plural -s realized as -z after voiced segments → backs vs. bagz) and with the regularity of sound change (like Latin ‘pater’ corresponding with English ‘father’ because voiceless stops (like p and t) became fricatives (like f and th) in Germanic). The case for an autonomous science of linguistics was greatly strengthened by such elegant correspondences, for these impressive regularities demonstrated not only that linguistic alternations are empirically observable but also that they cannot be explained as well with the postulates of any other discipline.
For a few decades, Bloomfield’s own delimitation of an autonomous linguistics proved to be a highly productive move. However dry mid-twentieth century linguistics might seem to the reader of today, the era was an exciting time for the development of both synchronic and diachronic grammar. But linguists were forbidden to discuss mental states, cognition, or any intuitions of meaning, for all of these had been banished to the realms of psychology and logic. In practice, this meant Bloomfield started grammatical analysis from the raw sound of the utterance, building from the ground up his interpretation of a particular language, always privileging form over meaning. Many of his analyses of phonological and morphological rules are brilliant. But somehow he never quite managed to say much of lasting value on the higher domains of glossemes and noemes, or in more modern terms, of syntax and semantics.
Bloomfield might have taught much Germanic philology, but he also studied a wider range of languages than perhaps any of his contemporaries. Bloomfield’s work on Tagalog, published over a century ago, is still regarded as the gold standard in Austronesian linguistics. And his work on Sanskrit and on four Algonquian languages (Fox, Cree, Menominee, and Ojibwa) brought to every scholar of language’s attention the ways in which languages can astonish by their ingenuity and complexity. A devout Bloomfieldian, Charles Hockett, analyzed one such ingenious and complex example, the obviation system found in many Algonquian languages. From the point of view of English, obviation is a tangle of semantic and indexical distinctions: animate/inanimate; near/far; actor/theme; direct/inverse. But Hockett managed to represent these relations in a diagram with planes, lines, points, and vectors. All very Euclidean. Yet the demonstration works surprisingly well as an explanation of the obligatory hierarchical arrangement of participants in Algonquian sentences. Through a kind of feature geometry, which ties together in a neat bundle several morphological paradigms, we learn something significant about “what Algonquian is really like.”
Being a good Bloomfieldian structuralist, Hockett devised an insightful theory of Algonquian. He did not create a theory of language in general or of all languages at once. For as Bloomfield and Hockett made plain, structural linguistics tips to the side of what Boas called historical particularism, away from the opposite pole of Saint Noam’s Universal Grammar. Each language is thus understood as the product of its own peculiar drift and development. There is no timeless essence of language which we are either headed toward or emerging from. Instead, each language has unique features to be understood in their own terms. By 1926, Bloomfield had arrived at a kind of relativist stance. It was not a Sapir-Whorf (meaning-based) relativism. Rather, Bloomfield’s relativism developed into a creed that languages will always vary formally and will inevitably contradict any purported substantive universals. As Bloomfield expressed in 1926: “Notions such as subject, predicate, verb, noun, will apply only to some languages, and may have to be defined differently for different ones,--unless, indeed, we prefer to invent new terms for divergent phenomena.” I feel this willingness to be surprised or vexed by languages radically different from our own furnishes the real basis for speaking of linguistics as an empirical science. Generativism cannot possibly account for astonishing variation if their entire apparatus (however minimal) is taken as a priori.
September 15, 2018
Un classico per chi voglia approcciarsi alla linguistica e ai suoi problemi e anche per chi voglia rispolverare le conoscenze in modo interessante.
March 27, 2024
Bloomfield's Language is a classic of structural linguistics. It is a comprehensive study of language in all of its various aspects, both descriptive and historical, from first principles. To the extent I can remember my linguistics text from about 1972, there seems to be very little difference; the book is very modern-seeming in most respects. I did have a couple of reservations. Firstly, he makes his explanations somewhat too complex by trying to phrase them in accordance with a rather crude form of stimulus-response behaviorism, which dates the book somewhat. Secondly, and more importantly, is that in describing the ideas of lexical and grammatical forms in his early chapters, he takes nearly all his examples from English. Most modern textbooks of linguistics try to avoid too many English examples, to counteract the tendency of new students to take English as "normal" and other languages as "exceptions".
The book begins with a history of the development of linguistic science up to his own time, discusses the idea of a speech community (and shows that it is not as simple as it would seem), and gives a survey of the different languages of the world divided into families. He then turns to the various sounds which can be made by our vocal organs and classifies them (phonetics). Next, he discusses the patterns of sounds which are actually significant for different languages (phonology), introducing the concept of a phoneme. However, it differs from the way I learned it in that he doesn't discuss allophones or complementary distribution and he uses square brackets for both phonetic and phonemic transcription rather than slashes for phonemes. Then he introduces in a very abstract way the ideas of morphemes, lexemes, taxemes and tagmemes (as well as many other -emes that I never heard of and that he never mentions again). He then goes on to describe grammatical forms, syntax and morphology, form-classes and lexicon, and other elements of structure; the book is very complete.
The second half of the book deals with the history of language, with chapters on the comparative method, dialect geography, phonetic change, analogic levelling, semantic change, and borrowing. This half (chapters 17-27) has been published as a separate book called Language History, which I read a long time ago.
Anyone with an interest in language, and especially change in language, needs to read this to begin with, and then perhaps supplement it with more contemporary works.
November 28, 2025
This book strolls into the mind like a silent monolith, tall enough to blot out the sun and calm enough to make you question whether the sun ever mattered. His presence on the page has that early-20th-century confidence—the kind where a scholar says, “Trust me, I measured reality,” and you kind of nod along because the rigour is so intense it feels like a gravitational field.
The book doesn’t simply describe language; it behaves like language describing itself, an ouroboros vocabulary that eats its own methodological tail.
In a way, reading Bloomfield today feels like watching a black-and-white film projected on a neon wall in 2025: the contrasts shift, the meanings melt, and the authority remains but is reframed by the tech-age glare behind it.
And yet, there is a charm in Bloomfieldian behaviourism, that stern refusal to attribute intention or meaning unless observable. It’s like the scholar version of a Gen Z kid refusing to guess someone’s vibe without receipts.
He builds language brick by brick, classifying, clarifying, and slicing forms with surgical neatness. You can hear a kind of proto-structuralist heartbeat, steady as a metronome. There is no room for fuzzy feelings—only patterns, distributions, and behaviours illuminated under the microscope of method. Even synonyms sound nervous here, like they're being interrogated under a bright lamp.
If Bloomfield were on social media today, he’d probably run a minimalistic account: no selfies, no hot takes, just obsessive taxonomy threads that go viral among linguistics nerds and terrify everyone else. But that is the secret thrill of reading him: the austerity becomes a style, the dryness becomes texture, and the certainty becomes an aesthetic.
Modern readers live in a world where language is treated as squishy, problematic, and slippery—but Bloomfield invites you into an era where everything could, in theory, be perfectly arranged if you just paid enough attention. It’s almost utopian, almost tragic. Yet through the tight scaffolding of phonemes, morphemes, and syntactic slots, you sense the book’s accidental poetry.
The rigour generates its own rhythm, and the rhythm becomes strangely hypnotic. In the end Bloomfield’s Language refuses to be simply a textbook; it becomes a monument to analytic ambition, a fossilised dream of total description.
And weirdly, that dream still glows in the cracks.
A classic and hence highly recommended.
The book doesn’t simply describe language; it behaves like language describing itself, an ouroboros vocabulary that eats its own methodological tail.
In a way, reading Bloomfield today feels like watching a black-and-white film projected on a neon wall in 2025: the contrasts shift, the meanings melt, and the authority remains but is reframed by the tech-age glare behind it.
And yet, there is a charm in Bloomfieldian behaviourism, that stern refusal to attribute intention or meaning unless observable. It’s like the scholar version of a Gen Z kid refusing to guess someone’s vibe without receipts.
He builds language brick by brick, classifying, clarifying, and slicing forms with surgical neatness. You can hear a kind of proto-structuralist heartbeat, steady as a metronome. There is no room for fuzzy feelings—only patterns, distributions, and behaviours illuminated under the microscope of method. Even synonyms sound nervous here, like they're being interrogated under a bright lamp.
If Bloomfield were on social media today, he’d probably run a minimalistic account: no selfies, no hot takes, just obsessive taxonomy threads that go viral among linguistics nerds and terrify everyone else. But that is the secret thrill of reading him: the austerity becomes a style, the dryness becomes texture, and the certainty becomes an aesthetic.
Modern readers live in a world where language is treated as squishy, problematic, and slippery—but Bloomfield invites you into an era where everything could, in theory, be perfectly arranged if you just paid enough attention. It’s almost utopian, almost tragic. Yet through the tight scaffolding of phonemes, morphemes, and syntactic slots, you sense the book’s accidental poetry.
The rigour generates its own rhythm, and the rhythm becomes strangely hypnotic. In the end Bloomfield’s Language refuses to be simply a textbook; it becomes a monument to analytic ambition, a fossilised dream of total description.
And weirdly, that dream still glows in the cracks.
A classic and hence highly recommended.
October 29, 2023
If only all textbooks were written like this, like a long letter to a friend unacquainted with the subject. So eloquent, so passionate, so well-organized, so logical, so full of interesting information. He writes with expertise on all major components of linguistic study, except maybe semantics, which unfortunately he thinks linguists can’t study. He not only possesses a deep and broad knowledge of linguistics, demonstrated through his synthesis and analysis of information that others have gathered, as well as the abundance of examples that illustrate his arguments, but is also clearly an independent and innovative thinker, for he makes many arguments about how language study study should be conducted (which, as far as I can tell, are of his own design) and intelligently weighs in on major controversies of the day.
One of the things that makes the book so fun is that it is investigative. It is an excellent introduction to the field of linguistics, because he assumes the reader knows nothing about the subject. He starts out with the question, “If one were to study language, how would one go about it?” and then leads the reader on from there. I would have liked the book even better if it were even more investigative, if, rather than telling the reader about a specific phenomenon of language, especially of the English language in particular, he had given the reader the opportunity to reflect and draw her own conclusions. We are all speakers a language, and so we are all capable of reflecting and drawing conclusions about our own language.
Another thing that makes this book so fun is that whenever he describes a particular phenomenon of language he gives examples of this phenomenon occurring in particular languages. The examples come from a delightfully wide range of languages, including Menominee, Chinese, Sanskrit, Russian, German, Greek, Cree, and Malaysian. He includes a transcription of the example words and phrases, and so the reader can practice pronouncing all of these different things in all of these different languages.
One of the things that makes the book so fun is that it is investigative. It is an excellent introduction to the field of linguistics, because he assumes the reader knows nothing about the subject. He starts out with the question, “If one were to study language, how would one go about it?” and then leads the reader on from there. I would have liked the book even better if it were even more investigative, if, rather than telling the reader about a specific phenomenon of language, especially of the English language in particular, he had given the reader the opportunity to reflect and draw her own conclusions. We are all speakers a language, and so we are all capable of reflecting and drawing conclusions about our own language.
Another thing that makes this book so fun is that whenever he describes a particular phenomenon of language he gives examples of this phenomenon occurring in particular languages. The examples come from a delightfully wide range of languages, including Menominee, Chinese, Sanskrit, Russian, German, Greek, Cree, and Malaysian. He includes a transcription of the example words and phrases, and so the reader can practice pronouncing all of these different things in all of these different languages.
January 2, 2026
Not consistent on his use of the term “America.” At first it seems to respect the name of the continent and then it fell into the same old appropriation of it.
A deeper analysis on Esperanto may have been nice in the conclusion rather than a rant on the Usonian education system, which did not feel at all like a conclusion but rather the middle of the next 500 pages.
A deeper analysis on Esperanto may have been nice in the conclusion rather than a rant on the Usonian education system, which did not feel at all like a conclusion but rather the middle of the next 500 pages.
Want to read
November 7, 2019the first serious books I read about linguistics.
September 1, 2021
Beautiful book
April 8, 2008
This book is 75 years old, yet reading it today, I can't help but feel that this would be a better introductory book for Linguistics students than the ones we use currently.
Bloomfield, over the course of a little over 500 pages covers almost every area of language imaginable, and he does so in a clear, understandable style, with a plethora of examples. It's an accessible book for any with an education, yet it is hardly shallow. In every area Bloomfield trears, it is clear he has a thorough knowledge.
Of course, the book lacks many of the developments that linguistics has made in since the 1930s, but reading through this work, I'm surprised by how few these new developments actually are.
It seems the linguistic 'revolutions' of the 20th century have brought us not that much further in understanding language than Bloomfield was back then.
Bloomfield, over the course of a little over 500 pages covers almost every area of language imaginable, and he does so in a clear, understandable style, with a plethora of examples. It's an accessible book for any with an education, yet it is hardly shallow. In every area Bloomfield trears, it is clear he has a thorough knowledge.
Of course, the book lacks many of the developments that linguistics has made in since the 1930s, but reading through this work, I'm surprised by how few these new developments actually are.
It seems the linguistic 'revolutions' of the 20th century have brought us not that much further in understanding language than Bloomfield was back then.
August 2, 2011
A revised version of Introduction to the Study of Language, 1914.
"The deep-rooted things about language, which mean most to all of us, are usually ignored in all but very advanced studies; this book tries to tell about them in simple terms and to show their bearing on human affairs. (vii)
"The deep-rooted things about language, which mean most to all of us, are usually ignored in all but very advanced studies; this book tries to tell about them in simple terms and to show their bearing on human affairs. (vii)
June 21, 2008
One of the first serious books I read about linguistics.
December 21, 2010
Not my favourite linguist, but this book is good enough for introduction to linguistics.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews