McWhorter ranges across linguistic theory, geography, history, and pop culture to tell the fascinating story of how thousands of very different languages have evolved from a single, original source in a natural process similar to biological evolution. Full of humor and imaginative insight, The Power of Babel draws its examples from languages around the world, including pidgins, creoles, and nonstandard dialects. He explores five main ways that languages change, such as sound change and the transformation of words into pieces of grammar.

There are approximately six thousand languages on Earth today, each a descendant of the tongue first spoken by Homo sapiens some 150,000 years ago. McWhorter notes that the way in which we are generally trained to think of languages has little in common with the way professional linguists think of them. McWhorter argues effectively to the contrary: that there are no languages, only dialects. This is a really interesting linguistic Novel...