Brenda Cox has unearthed bundles of unusual facts that will hit home with children, and planted these in solid linguistic information. Why does Arabic have many words for 'camel' and only one for ice and snow? Do all peoples have words to express numbers? And there are broader questions: What makes language unique? What do languages have in common? Why do they change? In covering the sounds and tones of language,dialects and accents, words and their parts, grammar, how writing developed, and more, this book is fun and appropriate reading from middle school children up.