I'm a nerd who grew up speaking two languages (both of which I'm still fluent in now as an adult), brought up in a household that speaks three (one of which I know the grammatical conventions of intuitively, but not as confident writing or speaking at length); I also like learning different languages, and though I wouldn't consider myself fluent in any of these new ones I can say that I have a deep love for languages and the different music they produce across countries and cultures. that said, i really really thought I would like reading this book.
 
this review was going to start on a positive note, i was sure of it, until i reached the part about the argument about a conservative and a liberal making meanings.

information is neutral. it's the telling of it that gets charged with political bias, and i regret to note that political bias is very much blatant here. i for one don't generally associate with myself with either label, finding both of them lacking in nuance (the extremes of either one is vomit-inducing for me for their inaccuracy in reflecting my personal beliefs) but Sedivy is apparently conservative-leaning, at least according to that one paragraph that attempts to describe the difference between the thinking processes of the two.

moving forward, i started scrutinizing each sentence for other things that would make me squint dubiously. the rest of this review will be written with this aforementioned knowledge in mind, just a fair warning.

it does consistently use the words "poetry" and "music" interchangeably, important to note if you're a poet and/or a musician and would like to contend with the syntactical choice.

some subsequent sections address the author's Mother which is a lovely tribute imo.

there are assertions about children that feel under-researched, or otherwise are probably drawing more from personal experience than fact, such as the assertion about children's beliefs (which, would've been presented better if a disclaimer about it were present, as in, if the author labeled such statements as reflection of personal experience rather than a generalization derived from peer-reviewed scientific research.) i think i got this impression from the distinct lack of specific experiences narrated to illustrate the assertions.

If you can enjoy a nonfiction book written with "lyrical" prose (not the adjective I would use, but I'll borrow that word from the book's description) without asking for more information, you'll probably be okay enjoying this book for what it is, but if you're like me and go "Like what? According to whom, specifically? In which contexts are these supposed to be true, and what are the exceptions to the rule? What are these generalizing statements supposed to illustrate, and why should I trust the information you're giving me?" then it's not going to be a pleasant experience here.

i enjoy creative ways to impart knowledge. nice-sounding paragraphs and ample use of fresh metaphors and other figures of speech make nonfiction fun for the reader, of course. but too much of this and too little of concrete, factual evidence takes away from the pleasure of reading nonfiction, at least for someone who expected much more. this may as well have been a prose poetry collection instead. re: my expectations of much more, it's because this book is being sold as "part memoir, part scientific exploration, and part cultural commentary," (quoted verbatim from its description) but imo it should be sold purely as memoir instead, as in, "things i found out about language from MY experience in a lab, and as someone who grew up learning to speak multiple languages." that way i wouldn't have set my own expectations about this in the way that i did.

tl;dr i am not this book's target audience which i would've figured out right away had the description for it been written differently, but i'm sure its target audience is out there aplenty.

Thank you to FSG Publishing and NetGalley for giving temporary access to an eARC in exchange for an honest review.

There are limitless platitudes about the virtues of language—language bridges minds, language defines the human experience, language is power. But what Julie Sedivy's book offers is so much more interesting: a celebration of the failures of language, the ambiguity of words, the impenetrability of a foreign language, the linguistic richness of old age even as the brain slows down. In her own research into psycholinguistics, the study of how the mind perceives sounds and words, Julie Sedivy was more drawn to the disfluencies of human speech, the slips of the tongue, the misinterpretations of garden-path sentences, the cases of aphasia. Whereas other linguists in her grad-school days tended be more interested in the abstract system of language, understanding and describing language according to a precise but theoretical grammar, Sedivy was more interested in the messy process of how brains understand language (in one of her own experiments, she discovered that when tests-subjects in a room full of objects are told to look for "candy", their eyes briefly skirt towards the "candle" when they hear "cand" but then turn to the candy when they here the final "y"). Her memoir starts with her experience as a young girl, a native Czech speaker, trying to communicate with her friend who only spoke Italian. Even as a child, she was attracted to the mystery and incomprehensibility of language, the puzzling sounds and elusive meanings of foreign words. As Julie Sedivy discusses moments of her life (marriage, divorce, the death of her husband), she reflects on what she has learned about the limits of language, the unknowability, the complexity, the "fumbling" of communication.

There is so much to learn from this book, She talks about the different status she ascribed to languages (Czech was the language of her parents; Italian was the language of freedom; English was "the language of authority and aspiration"; French, the language she spoke in East Montreal with kids on the street, was the language of fun, the shared patois of immigrant children). Drawing on both her personal experiences and research, she describes how languages and accents were, in the school room, more of a dividing line than race—children naturally make friends with the people who sound like them and speak their language. Children will also trust familiar people when learning new words while they will distrust strangers and people who don't use words in similar ways. Elsewhere, as she reflects on her later life, she discusses the Japanese idea of "kuuki o yomu" (reading the room), the idea that good conversationalists often speak elliptically and mysteriously, because they value and love each other enough to spend the time decoding each other's speech. Obliqueness and ambiguity are not linguistic errors or infelicities, but a show of respect and trust (whereas, for many Americans, directness and explicitness are more often praised). Later, on a related topic, she talks about how women are often penalized for moments when they hedge or suggest uncertainty (when more often they are actually trying to build rapport). She cites a fascinating study which showed that when male contestants are losing the game, they are more likely to use uptalk (raising their tone at the end of a sentence so that it sounds like a question, suggesting uncertainty); in contrast, women are more often inclined to use uptalk when they are ahead in the game and they don't want to be perceived as gloating.

I found something liberating in this book, upending conventional ideas about language. Sedivy turns a skeptical eye on public speaking clubs which discourage the use of fillers (like "um" and "ah"); Sedivy argues we should embrace these disfluencies as a sign of authentic thinking. A person who pauses and interrupts their speech is genuinely pondering. I loved her chapter on old age. Younger audiences are often prejudiced to view the slow-speaking elderly as doddering victims of cognitive decline, but what Sedivy argues is that, while cognition slows down in old age, the elderly often have a wealth of more knowledge (and when speaking, they are often juggling significantly more information accumulated over decades). Their slow speech needs to be reappraised as evidence of deep wisdom rather than feeble dementia. I was particularly interested in her discussion of the writer Paul West, a prolific novelist and poet who suffered a profound stroke resulting in global aphasia. While his neurologist predicted he would only make limited improvement, West was able to recover significant linguistic skill because his literary mind had created a rich network of pathways (when a therapist asked him to identify a figure on a piece of paper, West said "cherubim" only to be corrected, "no, it's an angel". Trying to recall the word for 'money", his mind pulls out the archaic slang "spondulick"). We need to rethink what we consider language proficiency, what we have predetermined sounds smart. There is a treasure of linguistic creativity even in someone who has sustained significant brain damage.

Whether discussing aphasia, old age, or deafness, Sedivy offers a refreshing perspective—language is resilient. The deaf have invented sophisticated means to communicate; victims of aphasia have heroically overcome debilitating obstacles. Sedivy's book invites readers to see language as so much more diverse and so much more expressive than we give credit for. There is beauty in dithering speech, halting conversations and all the linguistic fumbling of human life.

A very impressive read ! Julie Sedivy is a true pedagogue, sucessfully interwining science knowledge with the richness of the language. The book is a must to read for anyone interested in linguistics. It is a unique reading experience. I regularly marvelled at how it is possible to combine the words and ideas in such a way to explain and demonstrate what is in fact how the language emerges and flows from our brain. Than you so much to the author and Netgalley to allow me to read an advanced copy. All opinions are mine.

Linguaphile was a interesting read, part-memoir, part-treatise on language and language acquisition. The author considered language and how she absorbed it during different stages in her life from childhood through to her studies and later research. It was fascinating in many ways, but it was rather specialised and, at times, technically focused, thus it's probably more suited to language and linguistics students or those with a very deep love for language and language studies rather than every-day readers. I am giving it four stars.