Goodbye Chomsky, and Other Essays on Language

The idea of this book is that language is too interesting to be enjoyed exclusively by linguists. This is undoubtedly unfair to linguists—not people who speak several languages but academic linguists (for whom linguistics is the scientific study of language). Though this book is informed by linguistics, it is not a linguistics book, rather a language-not-linguistics book. It is a book about topics involving language that interest me and that I hope will be interesting to the intellectually curious reader. Its topics include J.R.R. Tolkien’s languages of Middle-earth, invented and artificial languages, language and gender, dialects, American versus British (Noah Webster), the Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis, African-American vernacular English, the history of English, English as the world’s language, language death, the rebirth of Hebrew in Israel, the Yiddish language, language in India, language and nationalism, DNA and the origins of language, the dilemma of the postcolonial writer, and more.