Why languages go extinct – and why it matters
Linguistic diversity is falling across the world, as Evangelia Adamou and Tim Brookes explore in new books
![The Māori language was threatened by New Zealand's "Native Schools"](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2024/08/13/TELEMMGLPICT000389944439_17235521003230_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqaHd6X3lW3lGv45Ug3tlONZ3XVdg1rRzimPdm_Jg3Voo.jpeg?imwidth=350)
Linguistic diversity is falling across the world, as Evangelia Adamou and Tim Brookes explore in new books
The English language is illogical, complex and inconsistent. Is it time to overhaul our spelling system and write phonetically instead?
This exhibition is serious, funny, and brilliant all at once – and brings us closer to the real Kafka than ever before
Adam Smyth’s The Book-Makers ranges from Benjamin Franklin to an eccentric typographer who threw all his type into the Thames
Harry Sidebottom's new book The Mad Emperor busts the most famous myth about Heliogabalus – but the truth about his reign is even stranger
Flea-ridden angels with beaks and blue wings hover over the closed-off garden, in an imaginative new novel from the author of Harvest
Voices from people around Britain are woven together in a brilliant, uncategorisable book – part oral history, part found poetry
Daniel Pick's new book Brainwashed: A New History of Thought Control grapples with thought-provoking ideas – but is let down by its prose
Eureka! Sarah Chaney’s excellent Am I Normal? is one of those rare pop-science books that make you look at the whole world differently
We think of them fuzzily as French but they were pagan pirates from Scandinavia whose conquests soon stretched from Africa to the Levant
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz's Don't Trust your Gut feels like a parody of a TED talk, harnessing big data to tell us… the bleeding obvious
We have a 'rosy nostalgia' about books and their civilising power, but they can be wielded barbarically, too
This 1,000-page magnum opus about a Jewish mystic has mind-blowing ambition – and largely fulfils it
The late Roberto Calasso spent four decades plundering art, myth and history – and now the Old Testament – to find what makes humans tick
Bart Van Loo's pacy history The Burgundians revives the forgotten duchy that had a northern powerbase mightier than kingdoms – then vanished
It should have been great: how Europe's greatest artists dealt with history's juiciest characters. But the classicist makes a muddle of it