The book brought to the attention of the reader by the famous American psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker contains a fascinating and multifaceted story about the phenomenon that is human language, considering it from a variety of points of view: linguistic, biological, historical, etc. “Are there grammatical genes?”, “Are chimpanzees able to learn sign language?”, “Does our language control our thoughts?” are just a few of the countless questions about language raised in this study. The book explains the mysteries of amazing phenomena related to language, such as "brainy" babies, grammatical genes, sign language in specially trained chimpanzees, "idiot" geniuses, talking Neanderthals , the search for the mother of all languages. The narration is told in a lively, easy language and contains many entertaining examples from modern spoken English, including slang and the language of cinema and songs. The book will be of interest to philologists of all specialties, psychologists, ethnographers, historians, philosophers, students and graduate students of humanities faculties, as well as everyone who studies the language and is interested in its problems.

For a complete understanding of the book, it is desirable to know the basics of English grammar. However, most phrases in English are provided with a Russian translation.

From the author of the Sclex fb2 document regarding version 1.1: 1) The book is well-read and formatted. 2) Unfortunately, one page of text was missing from the djvu version of the book, so it is not in this file either. 3) To display some characters of this text (in particular, English transcription), a Unicode font is required, for example Arial Unicode MS. 4) Pictures in the book are up to 460 pixels wide.