Blending the spirit of Bill Bryson's Mother Tongue""with the science of Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct, The Unfolding of Language is a remarkably original inquiry into the development of that most essential -- and mysterious -- of human creations: language.
'Language is mankind's greatest invention -- except of course, that it was never invented.' So begins this enthralling investigation into the evolution of language. Given that no-one sits down to design languages, how did there come to be so many, and of such elaborate design? If we started off with rudimentary utterances on the...

Guy Deutscher argues that, contrary to the fashionable academic consensus of today, language does relate to culture and thought, does reflect our own culture and creates a lens through which we see the world.