"How Language Works": He walks the walk, and talks the talk

"How Language Works: How Babies Babble, Words Change Meaning, and Languages Live or Die"
by David Crystal
Overlook, 500 pp., $32.50

David Crystal's comprehensive treatment of the most basic human communication in "How Language Works" sometimes reads like a text book, but this effort — like the hike up a scenic mountain — makes the destination that much more rewarding. The view from up there, I can tell you, is spectacular.

Crystal, an author and professor of linguistics, is a terrific teacher. He presents technical topics — such as the physiology of speech and linguistic terms — in digestible bites: short chapters with numerous subheadings. Seventy-two of 73 chapters begin with "How" as in "How we use tone of voice" and "How conversation works."

Yet this book is much more than "linguistics for dummies." The background Crystal provides is necessary for his probing and engrossing analysis of language.

Crystal first explores the elements of language, mainly speech, writing, reading and signing. After laying out the basics of phonetics and grammar, he delves into the "hows" of language acquisition by children, writing and the meaning of what we say. He includes several fascinating chapters on the world's languages — 6,000 spoken in 200 countries. Another interesting factoid: The area between the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea has one of the highest concentrations of languages (40) in the world.

As one would hope for in a man who makes a living thinking about language, Crystal writes with exceptional clarity and articulation. He is mostly composed and nonjudgmental about his subject — until he opines about self-appointed guardians of usage, the "prescriptivists" who rail against perceived grammatical or syntactic offenses (ending a sentence with a preposition, or split infinitives, for instance).

"Languages, like buildings and bridges, have tolerances built into them so that they can survive changing circumstances," Crystal writes. "The aim of prescriptivists is to remove these tolerances. If they were ever successful, languages, like buildings and bridges, would then indeed break down."

Change doesn't mean deterioration or decay, he asserts, and "looking after" language involves understanding that change is "inevitable, continuous, universal, and multidirectional." One recent example is the proliferation of electronic communication, especially e-mail and text messaging. While it has attributes of both speech and writing, it is neither — just a new and revolutionary language medium.