Also of interest...in the mysteries of language

Babel No More

by Michael Erard (Free Press, $26)

Michael Erard went looking for hyperpolyglots—people who speak 11 languages or more—and came back with a “captivating” study of language itself, said Maria Popova in TheAtlantic.com. Some interesting characters turn up. Giuseppe Mezzofanti, a 19th-century cardinal, allegedly spoke 72 tongues, while Ziad Fazah held the 20th-century record until he appeared on TV and fumbled several languages. Examining such outliers, Erard manages to probe “the limits of the human brain.”

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The Language Wars

by Henry Hitchings (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28)

Henry Hitchings has a message for all self-righteous grammarians: Get over yourselves. In this delightful tour of the history of so-called “proper” English, said Tucker Shaw in The Denver Post, Hitchings proves that for any living language change is the only constant. He “brings a deep respect for the sanctity of communication and the usefulness of rules,” but “values curiosity over knowledge, debate over absolutism.” With this book, he’s “earned a place at the head table of contemporary linguists.”

Speaking American

by Richard W. Bailey (Oxford, $28)

If you want further proof that language is “a living, evolving force,” check out Richard Bailey’s history of American English, said Chris Tucker in The Dallas Morning News. Though this book “sometimes bogs down in scholarly minutiae about diphthongs and interdental fricatives,” it contains plenty of fun anecdotes about the evolution of such words as “punke” and “goober.” Speaking American is “not a smooth and tidy vessel,” but “neither is the language it surveys.”

The Flame Alphabet

by Ben Marcus (Knopf, $26)

Communication is literally a killer in Ben Marcus’s “chilly yet passionate” new novel, said Jeff VanderMeer in CSMonitor.com. Marcus’s dystopian nightmare of a story gets rolling when words spoken by young children begin to sicken and kill adults. When one teenager’s speech begins afflicting her parents, her father leaves the family to find a cure. Marcus’s allegory is more about a father’s love than about language, but it “may make readers think more carefully about the words they share.”