Native Tongues

Preface 1. There Are 2,796 Languages in the World 2. How Languages Started 3. How Languages Spread and Decline 4. 1066 and the French Invasion of English 5. How You Can Turn Thousands of English Words into French, Spanish, Italian, German, Portuguese, or Dutch 6. Language, Gender, and Sex 7. Language Incidents That Changed History 8. Rallying Cries of Conquest, Defiance, or Prayer 9. Words of Love and Admiration 10. Insults and Profanity around the World 11. Ethnic Slurs and Their Comparatively Innocent Origins 12. Same Sounds—Different Meanings 13. Language Survival and Survival through Language 14. Clicks, Whistles, Gestures, and Musical Scales 15. Counting—Fingers, Toes, and Computers 16. Our Mysterious Alphabet 17. An Asian Script of Subtlety and Humor 18. Language Lost—and Found Again 19. Word Frequency and Some Surprises 20. Some Evocative Names for Animals 21. Do Animals Have a Language 22. Undiplomatic Translations 23. What's in a Name: Places 24. What's in a Name: People 25. The View from the Tribe 26. There Were Others before Columbus 27. The Local Coloring of Proverbs 28. The Levels of Politeness 29. Hello and Goodbye 30. The World's Shortest Phrasebook in the Most Languages 31. Odd Origins and Changing Meanings 32. Palindromes, Nonstop Words, Tongue Twisters, and Historic Puns 33. The Language of Revolution 34. Military Codes and Linguistic Deceptions 35. Secret Languages, Crime, and Slang 36. Languages in Space 37. English vs. American 38. The Export of English Words 39. Someday—a World Language Acknowledgments Index