Birding English: Exploring the History of a Language Through 50 Birds

“A brilliantly ingenious bringing together of two worlds, which will inform and entertain linguists and birders alike. I learned a huge amount about birdlore from each chapter; and I've no doubt that bird-lovers will find the linguistic perspective equally fascinating. An unexpectedly illuminating synergy.”—David Crystal, author, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language   “Birding English is a wide-ranging and delightful blend of ornithology and linguistics, with a wealth of surprising facts you’ll want to immediately share at a party. It offers valuable insights on the past, present, and future of birds and language, showing the importance of understanding where we’ve been so that we can appropriately meet future challenges, both as speakers of a living language and as creatures in the natural world.”—Rosemary Mosco, author, The Birding Dictionary: A Tongue-In-Cheek Guide for People Who Find Themselves Obsessed, Against All Logic and Reason, with Birds “This imaginative book retells the history of the English Language through the names of birds. From Indo-European, through Old Norse and Old English, and reaching into languages from Africa to the South Pacific, Jeremy Withers explores how the sounds and sense of English changed in response to the landscape and the forms of life. Birds were omens; they were divinities; they were food; they sang; they flocked. They were a kind of parallel society to humans, and by looking at the avian imagination, Withers shows how we are really looking at ourselves. He has traveled far and wide, collecting words much as an explorer would collect exotic specimens. His book is thus a dazzling menagerie, inviting readers to let the familiar and the strange alight on our shoulders with a twitter in our ears.”—Seth Lerer, author, Introducing the History of the English Language “Smart, sharp, and surprising. Birding English connects the dots between language, history, and culture in ways I didn’t anticipate, from Shakespeare to rhyming slang, Chaucer to the Notorious B.I.G. If you love etymology, sociology, and learning about the uniqueness of the English language, including my new favorite word ‘heezie-hosie,’ you’ll delight in this book.”—Becca Rowland, author, Bird Talk: Hilariously Accurate Ways to Identify Birds by the Sounds They Make “Birding English is an entertaining compendium of micro essays. . . . satisfying both as a sweeping overview and as a fount of fun facts.”—Audubon Magazine