I’ve often been asked to give some recommendations for people who want to get started studying linguistics without having to resort to enrolling in a formal university programme.
So far, I’ve tried to help by including a reading list at the end of each paid post, which acts like a mini-curriculum for someone wanting to get into that particular topic. But I’ve never given a general reading list for someone who is interested in language and wants to understand how it works more deeply.
I should stop here to explain why on earth you might want to understand how human language works more deeply. There are many reasons — don’t discount being able to fact-check etymologies on social media — but the most interesting to me is that language provides a window onto human nature, one that can be studied rigorously.
Language, after all, is one of the things that is unique to Homo sapiens.1 If we understand how it works, we’ll come to know more about what it means to be human.
At least that’s what we thought for a long time. In the world of LLMs, the “language is unique to Homo sapiens” claim is now up for debate in a new way, with some linguists claiming that LLMs do not have language in the human sense at all — only a convincing imitation of it. Other linguists disagree — and strongly, although I haven’t heard of any instances of chair-throwing at conferences over the question.
If all this is starting to sound interesting, you’ll want to read on.
You’re reading The Dead Language Society, where 88,000+ readers explore the hidden history of the English language. I’m Colin Gorrie: PhD linguist and your guide through 1,500 years of linguistic history.
I publish every Wednesday. Paid subscribers get every issue, the full archive, and my most in-depth work, including longer essays that trace the mysteries of English to their source, practical guides to reading historical texts yourself, and live book clubs where we read texts like Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
What follows is my attempt to guide you into the dark forest that is linguistics, where the jargon is bizarre, the concepts often obscure, and respectable scholars whip themselves into a frenzy over whether the “human language faculty” exists.2
Don’t worry — it’s not actually that bad. Like the water of a cold lake, you get used to it after a while. Unlike a cold lake, however, I don’t recommend plunging into linguistics in the deep end. Here, the shock may kill any desire you had to study the subject in the first place. Wading in gradually is the much better option.
We begin, therefore, with pop linguistics books, and progress only gradually into more technical territory. After a healthy helping of textbooks (and online lectures), you will emerge on the other side able to get something out of academic books and papers.
Of course, linguistics is an enormous discipline, filled with many subdisciplines and subsubdisciplines. I’m going to focus here on what you need to understand “general linguistics”, or the study of the core phenomena of language itself: sounds, grammar, and the relationship between the two.3
I will, however, include a slight detour to show you the historical side of linguistics, because that’s what this Substack is all about.
Not a lot of people know this, given the kind of writing I do here, but my doctoral training actually isn’t in historical linguistics per se, but in theoretical linguistics.4 So I’ll include some things from the world of theoretical linguistics as well.
Understanding the basics of linguistic theory helps you with whatever kind of linguistics you want to pursue, whether your tastes run more to etymologies, language learning, or arguing about human nature on the internet.
Level one
First, get yourself a popular history of the English language. There are several out there, all doing in book form more or less the same thing we do every week here on Substack: tell the story of how English became the language it is today.
These books tend to begin with Old English, either the migration of Germanic-speaking people to Britain in the 5th century, or with Old English as a written language in the 7th and 8th centuries. I’m writing a book that starts earlier than that, but you’ll have to wait a couple years to read it.
If you’ve been reading the Dead Language Society for a while, you’ll probably know some of the main beats of this story: Beowulf, the Norman Conquest, Chaucer, the printing press, the Great Vowel Shift, Shakespeare, and so on.
But it’s worth hearing it all in a single volume, woven together by a great storyteller. Any of the following three will do. If you read all three, and note the similarities and differences in emphasis, you’ll get a good sense for what is important in the field and where some of the debates are.
