Rating: 
Summary: Charming intro to the intricacies of English
Review: Everything Bryson has written is perfect, but I recommend The Mother Tongue to the newcomer because it charms and endears from the first: "More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it seems, try to. It would be charitable to say the results are sometimes mixed." From this point, you know you are in the hands of a sharp, witty writer who will entertain you and learn ya' sumpin', too!
Rating: 
Summary: Not as good as Bryson's travel books
Review: Although this book has some of Bryson's wit and the character of his later work, it's missing a lot of the verve that his travel books have. It also contains wrong information, for instance the rather obviously false assertion that language is the basic mode of thought.
Rating: 
Summary: Fascinating and fun, but sometimes inaccurate
Review: Bryson is one of the most entertaining writers around. His "Lost Continent" is one of the funniest books I've ever read, and I've liked everything he's written. "The Mother Tongue" is less sidesplitting than much of his work, but it makes up for that by the endless anecdotes about English.Not all his facts are straight, though; see other reviews here for a list of some errors. One among many: he repeats the old and thoroughly discredited claim that the Eskimo language has more words for snow than English does; fifty words. In fact English has many more words than Eskimo (Inuit), though the agglutinative nature of the language means that it is hard to limit the word count in Eskimo. The claim is covered in detail in Geoffrey Pullum's "The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax". "The Mother Tongue" is structured as a history of English. However, reading it, what one remembers are the little details. When he talks about the rising call for spelling reform at the end of the eighteenth century, he cites Noah Webster, lobbying Congress to make bad spelling a punishable offense. In the dicussion of Americanisms, to illustrate the inexplicable British hostility to American English, he quotes the stylebook of the Times of London: "'normalcy' should be left to the Americans who coined it"; in fact, 'normalcy' is a British coinage. These touches are what makes this book so good. They add a personal and amusing feel to material that is already fascinating. Bryson covers quite a few topics. In addition to the chapters on spelling and Americanisms, and several devoted primarily to history, there are chapters on swearing, wordplay, pronunciation, word origins, names, usage and dialects. Each is full of colourful stories and is a pleasure to read. Highly recommended. Just don't believe every single story.
Rating:
Summary: Entertaining and inspiring - but factually misleading
Review: It is a very easy to read book, a layman book. It would be very inspiring for a young kid wondering about language, and needing interesting "facts" to put schoolwork. However, a more serious reader cannot avoid noticing little mistakes everywhere... and after reading the other reviews I know that there are even more mistakes than I tought. Mr. Bryson must have a very limited knowledge of foreign languages - be it Finnish, French, Italian... but he mention them as known! Exemples: who says that RSVP is not used in France? HA! it is in every formal invitation. Same for "nom de plume", or "panache", while "bon vivant" are also perfectly current French (I don't know if there was a previous form as mentioned by Bryson, bon viveur...)(p.74) Or, "snob" coming from English? as far as I know, it is a contraption from the latin words "sine nobilitate", without nobility... or is it not? All the same, colonnade coming from Italian "colonnello"? I would rather bet from "colonna" (pillar...), isn't that simpler? or even from the late latin "columna, ae".... hmmmm.(p. 122) And who ever heard the Italian word "schiacchenze"? maybe it is dialect? (p.183) Unfortunately, finding a few inaccuracies (in+accurate, in- here expressing negation) makes one doubt (with a b) the rest.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting
Review: Bill Bryson writes witty, interesting books. This isn't just for the peolpe with a special intrest in the subject, its for everybody.
Rating:
Summary: A delightful romp through the history of our language.
Review: I wish Bill Bryson was my teacher in high school. He takes a tedious subject, language, and makes it fun. This book is about everything you wondered about but didn't know who to ask about. I've owned it for almost ten years. I've read and reread it at least a dozen times...usually before lending it to a friend. The Mother Tongue is the perfect addition to any nightstand.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant discourse on language, and its history
Review: So what if Bill Bryson makes a few errors? The book consists of entertaining and fun discussions on the history of English, including the waves of influences on the language. He shows, for example, that Old English included a number of features of current languages, such as a use of gender (a male word for female genitalia?), and varieties of case-forms. Over the centuries, however, these complications have died out, only to be replaced by spelling and pronunciation difficulties. He makes a point that language is a living thing and that organizations and governments should not try to direct its development, because such directions are almost always futile. Thought-provoking, particularly for all sometime-students of language.
Rating:
Summary: Go the Surgeon
Review: Pity Mr Winchester's (bestselling - yeeks!) convoluted tale about the development of England's no 1 dictionary and associated madmen did not exude with the fun and fascination of this book. Thank you Bill! We forgive the odd factual error from you but not pretence from that other fellow!
Rating:
Summary: Entertaining, but full of errors
Review: This book is one of the best ways to get anyone to learn about the English language. The anecdotes and examples are very funny. However, they are often inaccurate. Eskimos (Inuits), for example, do not have 50 words for snow. They have two, namely, aput and qanik. The morphology of their language makes it possible to combine two distinct words to form another. Dirty+snow = dirtysnow and so on. Anyone who has any sort of background in linguistics should be on guard for such mistakes. The book IS amusing... but one should not, by any means, take it as canon.
Rating:
Summary: Great, but not always accurate
Review: A lot of people have catalogued the errors in this book. I would like to point out that everything Bryson says about the Chinese language is wrong. "Guoyu" is the Taiwanese designation for Mandarin, "Putonghua" is the Mainlanders'. The so-called "Peking" dialect (it's been 'Beijing' for fifty years) is really just a way to refer to Mandarin in general. And as for every word having to end in "n" well, I don't know where he got that idea. Small distractions from an enjoyable book.
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