An award-winning look at the relationship between the language we speak and our perception of such fundamentals of experience as time, space, color, and smells.

We tend to assume that all languages categorize ideas and objects similarly, reflecting our common human experience. But in fact many basic concepts are not universal. Speakers of different languages literally see and think about the world differently.

Caleb Everett takes readers around the globe, explaining what linguistic diversity shows us about human culture. For instance, though we may think that everybody refers to time in spatial terms—in English, it “passes us by”—speakers of the Amazonian language Tupi Kawahib never do. In fact, Tupi Kawahib has no word for “time” at all. And while it has long been understood that languages categorize colors that speakers regularly encounter, evidence also suggests that the color words at our disposal affect how we actually perceive colors. Similarly, the terms available to us affect the range of smells we can identify.

Why do some cultures talk anthropocentrically about things being to one’s “left” or “right,” while others use geocentric words like “east” and “west”? What is the connection between what we eat and the sounds we make? A Myriad of Tongues answers these and other questions, yielding profound insights into fundamentals of human communication and experience.

"In the Amazonian region of Brazil, where anthropologist Caleb Everett spent much of his childhood, speakers of Tupi-Kawahíb never refer to time ‘passing by.’ Indeed, the language has no word for ‘time.’ By contrast, most European languages have few abstract words for odours, whereas languages in a number of other cultures have more than a dozen. Everett’s fascinating book—based on collaboration with biologists, chemists, political scientists and engineers—ponders such differences between the world’s 7,000-plus languages." - Nature

"An assured guide to new thinking about how language shapes the way we see the world—at a time when thousands of languages are vanishing." - New Scientist

"Everett dwells on the richness of the world’s disappearing tongues…[A] sophisticated account of how researchers, by finally beginning to draw on a more representative sample of the world’s languages, are making connections between language, thought, and other aspects of the human experience." - Foreign Affairs

"[A] mind-expanding delight…a beguiling tour of the variation in vocabularies for…core human concepts, as well as in languages’ inventories of sounds and their syntactic possibilities." - EuropeNow

"Historically, academics have looked for commonalities among languages and focused mainly on those used by Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) societies. But, Everett says, the tide is shifting…His book synthesizes his own and others’ research that brings in data from non-WEIRD languages and broadens our understanding of how words affect cognition, including how we process the concepts of time, space, color, and kinship." - Harvard Business Review

"Offers readers a tantalizing glimpse into the wide variety of human speech patterns evident in the world today." - Library Journal

"An enlightening examination of human communication based on the findings of linguist fieldworkers—himself included—as well as researchers in areas such as cognitive psychology, data science, and respiratory medicine." - Kirkus Reviews

"Everett relates complex linguistic discussions in accessible terms, and each page is full of thought-provoking insights." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Provides a cogent and intriguing overview of how language shapes the way we think and speak." - Technical Communication