Mother Tongue – Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson is best known for his travel books, which are a fascinating blend of subjective experience and objective facts, wry humour and self-deprecation, where his maturation in the US is contrasted with spending the rest of his life living in the UK, the US, and back to the UK. However he has also written two books about language – Troublesome Words and Mother Tongue.
In Mother Tongue Bryson explores the origins of language in general (looking at the differences between dialects, pidgin, Creole and evolving languages) before turning specifically to English – how it arose, how impact of multiple influxes of dominant foreign languages on grammar, syntax and vocabulary, and the ever-present concerns of simplification and differentiation, before concluding with the fun of English wordplay.
Bryson discusses the coining of new words that modern English would be significantly poorer without – not just Shakespeare’s generous contributions (including critical, fragrant and homicide), but also those of less well known writers, including Ben Jonson (damp, clumsy), Sir Thomas More (acceptance, explain, exaggerate), Sir Thomas Elyot (modesty), Samuel Coleridge (intensify), Jeremy Bentham (international) and Thomas Carlysle (environment). He also discusses coinages that didn’t catch on, finishing with "Dickens tried to give the world vocular. The world didn’t want it." [Vocular - "a short or weak utterance". Thank you, Google!]
Speaking of Shakespeare, Bryson exposed me to the fact that, were it not for his father’s move shortly before his birth, "the Bard of Avon would instead be known as the rather less ringing Bard of Snitterfield."
The work that linguists have performed, particularly in mapping out regional differences, is impressive. I was particularly taken with the fact that the Dixie dialect (in south Utah):

revers[es] ‘ar’ and ‘or’ sounds, so that a person from St. George doesn’t park his car in a carport but rather porks his core in a corepart… when someone leaves a door open, Dixie speakers don’t say ‘Were you born in a barn?’ They say ‘Where you barn in a born?’

English has taken a lot of words from other languages, often without significant change, but Bryson also discusses the adoption of English words by other languages, often altered to fit the language pattern more closely – hence the Ukrainian herkot (hair cut) Polish ajskrym (ice-cream), Lithuanian muving pikceris (moving pictures), Italian schiacchenze (shake hands) and Japanese shyanpu setto (shampoo and set) or sarada (salad).

European languages… show a curious tendency to take English participles and give them entirely new meaning, so the French don’t go running or jogging, they go footing.

And in German "a book that doesn’t quite become a best seller is ein steadyseller."
Bryson spends some time looking at the divergence of British and American English (the latter retaining a number of terms that fell into disuse in the UK, and which were then held up by English language purists as examples of American barbarism), and the centuries-old concern that the language is in danger of unrecognisable change unless someone (usually the distressed authors) take steps to protect it.
I heard Bryson speak recently - one of the audience members asked him why he always includes a reference to Belgium in his writing (usually as a measure of size, like "smaller than Belgium"). He, like me, wasn't aware that he did that, and I didn't notice any Belgium-relatedness in Mother Tongue. However, as it just wouldn’t be an American-related Bryson book without it, Mother Tongue includes two contributions from the American roadside advertising campaign by Burma-Shave shaving cream (1926 – 1965, and for which Bryson is nostalgic): A peach/looks good/with lots of fuzz/but man’s no peach/ and never was/Burma Shave! And my personal favourite, which was too risqué for public viewing: If wifie shuns/your fond embrace/don’t shoot/the iceman/feel your face/Burma Shave. - Alex