A review of An Introduction to Language by Victoria Fromkin & Robert Rodman

My first linguistics book

I guess this review could be a bit biased, since it was the first linguistics book that I read and all the subsequent ones felt a bit repetitive, but I do have some good reasons for this being my favourite book in this category. I went into this topic knowing near to nothing about it.

One thing that differentiates this linguistics book from most others is that it regularly includes comics relating to the topic at hand. They are usually placed at the chapter beginnings, but they could be at other places in the chapter. Another cool feature is the inclusion of quotes at the start of the chapters. Some of my favourites are the ones from George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, since that was a play I had to do for setwork in my final year at high school.

This book has everything one would expect from a primer in this subject. It covers various topics including: language acquisition, language evolution, syntax, semantics, phonetics, phonology, & other fields.

In some other linguistics books that I have read, the writer firmly shows their stance on what type of grammarian they are (either prescriptive of descriptive). This book takes a fully neutral stance on the topic and doesn't force any beliefs onto the reader. They show both perspectives and give valid points in favour of each of the opinions.

This paragraph won't apply if you're reading the book on a digital medium, since I would like to speak a bit about the publishing quality. Overall, I would say that it has a very high standard of publishing. It was published by Harcourt Brace. The paper is nice and white and of a high standard. I also like the fonts, and I didn't have any problems with how all the text is laid out. The covers are strong, but not too thick, so the book is flexible.

In conclusion, one would have to go very far to find a book on basic linguistics which is better than this (in my opinion, at least). I would recommend that everyone reads this even if you think you don't have an interest in linguistics because you never know what you haven't tried. So when you're bored, just give it a try. Maybe you'll like it. Maybe you won't. That you will have to discover yourself.