Chitchat: Celebrating the World’s Languages by Jude Isabella (review)

This slender volume talks about talking (and writing), touching conversationally on matters ranging from word origin to slang to language extinction and language creation. Each spread focuses on a particular topic, often including a sidebar or two and even a short pertinent quiz. Isabella often goes beyond the usual chestnuts here, digging into recent material and terms for some intriguing items (the linguistic ambiguity known as “crash blossoms,” for instance), and her point of view is less Anglocentric than usual (she notes, for example, that monolingual people are a global minority, despite the fact that monolingualism is the norm for native English speakers). The book is marred, however, by the complete absence of source notes for the information; additionally, the compositions are visually awkward, with a stodgy layout at odds with the aggressively distorted, hyperreal, and often garish digital collage figures. There’s still some genuinely interesting information here in a reassuringly modest dose, so kids who come for browsing might well be drawn into reading. An index is included.