A review by pearl35
What Language Is: And What It Isn't and What It Could Be by John McWhorter

3.0

Popularization of research on language--how Iranian tracks with the distribution of gene M17 in the Middle East, the formations of creoles and pidgins, empires and languages in the south Pacific, code switching, modern Hebrew, the many failures of Esperanto, tracking down the formation of ancient Chinese and how slang evolves from spoken use. Entertaining examples, and the popular element of it is forgivable because of the extensive bibliography of where the real information came from.