A review by hopeadinfinitum
Language: The Basics by R.L. Trask

informative medium-paced

4.5

A really good primer for learning about language and linguistics, very readable and with lots of excellent examples. Lots of the content was familiar to me from a long ago AS level, but I still learned a lot of new, interesting things. My two small critiques would be - firstly, the few examples of the Geordie dialect are awful, they don’t ring true, which bugged me a little; and secondly there was a passage about how there is no gender neutral pronoun that would allow us to avoid saying ‘he or she/his or her’  etc… the mental gymnastics required to avoid the use of ‘they/their/them’ to refer to people of unknown gender in this book must have been astonishing.