"An assured guide" (New Scientist) to 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 this isn’t the case. When we look closely, we find that many basic concepts are not universal, and that speakers of different languages literally see and think about the world differently. Caleb Everett takes readers around the globe, explaining what linguistic diversity tells us about human culture, overturning conventional wisdom along the way. For instance, though it may seem that everybody refers to time in spatial terms―in English, for example, we speak of time “passing 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 based on those that speakers regularly encounter, evidence suggests that the color words we have at our disposal affect how we discriminate colors themselves: a rose may not appear as rosy by any other name. What’s more, the terms available to us even determine the range of smells we can identify. European languages tend to have just a few abstract odor words, like “floral” or “stinky,” whereas Indigenous languages often have well over a dozen. 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 the 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.” ― Andrew Robinson , 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.” ― Colin Barras , 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.” ― Ross Perlin , 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.” ― Julie Sedivy , 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.” ― Lucy Swedberg , 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.” ― Nicole St. Germaine , Technical Communication “Blending an ethnographer’s richness with an experimentalist’s clarity, Everett adroitly explains how what we’ve learned from data-driven studies of a myriad of tongues–from Amazonia and Africa to Australia and Austronesia–has dramatically shifted our understanding of the origins and nature of our species’ most salient ability: language. Far from being an isolated projection of innate psychology, languages evolve like other aspects of culture, adapting to our ecological contexts, social norms, acoustic environments, and cognitive inclinations. Languages also shape how speakers think, feel, and even perceive. With balance and breadth, this book offers an easy entry into a fascinating, though often ferocious, interdisciplinary field.” ― Joe Henrich, aut