Linguaphile: A Life of Language Love

Language scientist Sedivy (Memory Speaks) delivers a rapturous essay collection in which scientific research comingles with recollections of the author’s childhood as a Czechoslovakian refugee. “By the age of five, due to my family’s winding trajectory through Europe and eventually Canada, five languages had seeped into my brain,” Sedivy writes—Czech, German, Italian, French, and English. In 12 essays across three sections (“Childhood,” “Maturity,” and “Loss”), she catalogs the influence of language on different phases of her life, expertly knitting together factual details with lyrical anecdotes. At one point, Sedivy posits that humans are, in some ways, more like songbirds than primates, describing the former as “our kindred patternmakers and imitators of sound.” Elsewhere, she examines the significance and cultural endurance of the moment when Helen Keller spelled out the word for water. Sedivy also turns her keen sense of observation on herself, capturing her excitement during her first linguistics class (“I had not imaged it possible to look under the surface of language,” she writes, detailing how she thrilled to the “concealed order” under the “membrane of conscious awareness”), and providing a fascinating window onto historical fears about the “dangers of bilingualism, which, some claimed, could lead... to schizophrenia or intellectual disability.” For lovers of the written and spoken word, this enchanting study is a must. (Oct.)