Language: History & General Works

By exploring a rich array of Malay texts from novels and newspapers to poems and plays, Tom G. Hoogervorst's Language Ungoverned examines how the M...

The mother tongue of the Roman Empire and the lingua franca of the West for centuries after Romes fall, Latin survives today primarily in classroom...

Ever feel like you are pedalling in the choucroute? Been caught with your beard in the mailbox again? Or maybe you just wish everyone would stop ir...

Are the general and the particular separated in legal rhetorics? What is the function of singular events, facts, names in legal argumentation and w...

Did you know that the Japanese have a word to express the way sunlight filters through the leaves of trees? Or, that theres a Swedish word that mea...

'What grammarians say should be has perhaps less influence on what shall be than even the more modest of them realize ...' No book had more influ...

A murder of crows, a charm of goldfinches, an ostentation of peacocks: collective nouns for British birds have existed since at least the mid fifte...

Containing thousands of examples of hipster slang drawn from pulp novels, classic noir and exploitation films, blues, country and rock''n''roll lyr...

In this brilliant transatlantic survival guide, Erin Moore examines the key differences between the British and the Americans through their languag...

The Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar is a straightforward and accessible A-Z guide to the diverse and often complex terminology of English gram...

A revelatory and exhilarating tour de force, Nicholas Ostler's The Last Lingua Franca: The Rise and Fall of World Languages explores the rise of a ...

Did you know that 'Almost' is the longest word in the English language with all the letters in alphabetical order? Or that 'Stewardesses' is the lo...

Most of us never realise how many words and expressions used in everyday English have a fascinating nautical origin. This charming pocketbook expla...

Ketchup began as a fermented fish sauce from Chinas Fujian province: ke for fermented fish, tchup for sauce. The British were the first to add toma...

The English Language is spoken by more than a billion people throughout the world. But where did English come from? And how has it evolved into the...

This fun, absorbing book, packed with quirky bite-sized lists, quizzes and trivia, is an exploration of the Latin language, aiming to prove that it...

The existence of the Welsh-language can come as a surprise to those who assume that English is the foundation language of Britain. However, J. R. R...