What to read about the origins of language

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This article is part of our Summer reads series. Visit the full collection for book lists, guest essays and more seasonal distractions. In 1786 William Jones, a British civil servant in Calcutta, told the Asiatic Society that Sanskrit had too much in common with Greek, Latin and other European languages for it to be by chance.

He had stumbled on the fact that these languages all shared a single parent. That discovery helped initiate a flowering in the 19th century of what was then called philology. Modern linguistics has moved into the study of many other elements of language, especially grammar.

But where languages came from and how they got to be as they are today remains a perpetually entertaining and fascinating topic, and one which (unlike much linguistic theorising) generalist readers may grasp and enjoy. The Power of Babel. By John McWhorter.

Harper Perennial; 352 pages; $17.99. Cornerstone; £12.99 John McWhorter is a linguist and a prolific writer of accessible books on the history of language. One of his earliest, “The Power of Babel", remains the broadest and best introduction to how languages come to be the weird things that they are.

Showing over many pages how a single Latin sentence becomes a French one, for example, he explains how at every level—sound, meaning, grammar—words refuse to sit still. (For those particularly interested in the peculiarities of English, Mr McWhorter’s “Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue" is the place to go.) Empires of the Word. By Nicholas Ostler.

HarperCollins; 640 pages; $17.99 and £20 Few writers have had the range and authority to write about as many languages as Nicholas Ostler. In this book he promises nothing less than a world history as told through language. From the