And the first thing we notice, if we listen to them very early on – at around one month of age, say – is that the noises they make don’t sound anything like language at all. They aren’t speaking. They’re just vocalizing – using t...

I should have begun this chapter by saying: all the authors have developed styles of their own. Style isn’t like our fingerprints. We have different styles, which we develop to suit the different circumstances in which we find ourselves. A...

What’s it all for? Why did the human race learn to speak, write, and sign? What’s the use of language? We might think the answer is very simple: to communicate with each other. That’s how I talked about it earlier in the book. But ther...

Then there are still a few parts of the world where people are discovering new languages. It can happen like this. An expedition travels to an isolated valley in the middle of the forests of Papua New Guinea and finds a small community livin...

When the air flows through the mouth, it’s a bit like wind going through a tunnel. The difference is that we can change the shape of the tunnel by moving our tongue and our lips, and also our jaw. Each time we make a new shape, we make a n...