Summer Reading Lists
The members of the Linguistics Institute have put together a list of interesting books, movies, YouTube channels, and other resources for adding some (leisure) linguistics to your summer break!
The list is intended for any linguistics enthusiast, and no prior knowledge of any branch of linguistics is required.
Thanks to the University and State Library (ULB), many of the titles are already available at the library and the links are included in the list.
2025
- The Ingenious Language: Nine Epic Reasons to Love Greek by Andrea Marcolongo
- Signs of Civilisation: How punctuation changed history by Bård Borch Michalsen
- Atlas der vom Aussterben bedrohten Sprachen, von Arnfrid Schenk, Stefan Schnell
- The AI Con, by Emily Bender and Alex Hanna
- Thirty-Two Words for Field: Lost Words of the Irish Landscape by Manchan Magan
- Babel by R. F. Kuang. A fantasy novel about the magic of translation, dark academia, and imperialism
- Exercises in Style (Stilübungen) by Raymond Queneau – Something fun, a tale is retold in various setting like Passive, Gastronomical, Mathematical, Awkward or Haiku
- The Kingdom of Speech by Tom Wolfe
- Research Mates in African Linguistics edited by Ngessimo M. Mutaka and Sammy B. Chumbow
- Heinrich Heine in your mother tongue
- Levy, Kim, and Fox. 2025. The Science of Language in the Era of Generative AI
- The love of books (How a complete library was saved during the war in Sarajevo)
2024
- Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World (Irene Vallejo)
- The Dictionary of Lost Words (Pip Williams)
- Is that a Fish in your ear? Translation the Meaning of Everything (David Bellos)
- The Penguin Book of Oulipo (Edited by Philip Terry)
- Endangered Alphabets, an Essay on writing (Tim Brookes)
- Poems from the Edge of Extinction: The Beautiful New Treasury of Poetry in Endangered Languages, in Association with the National Poetry Library
- Just a Phrase I’m going Through, My life in language (David Crystal)
- The language instinct (Steven Pinker)
- Musicophilia (Oliver Sacks)
- Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes
- Through the Language Glass (Guy Deutscher)
available at ULB: https://katalog.ulb.hhu.de/Record/990023722890206443 and https://katalog.ulb.hhu.de/Record/990023885400206443 - The Unfolding of Language (Guy Deutscher)
- Language Myths (Laurie Bauer & Trudgill)
- Heterogenia Linguistico: An Introduction to Interspecies Linguistics (Seno Salt)
- The Linguistics Wars (Randy Allen Harris)
- The Semantics of Murder (Aifric Campbell)
- The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (John DeFrancis)
- Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: An edition printed in the International Phonetic Alphabet (Lewis Carroll, transcribed by Michael Everson)
- The Awful German Language (Mark Twain)
- Babel (Gaston Durren)
- Arrival (movie)
- Still Alice (movie)
- Hot Skull (Sicak kafa)
- My Fair Lady (movie)
- languagejones
- NativLang
- etymology_nerd
For computational linguists:
- AI Coffee Break with Letitia
- Yannic Kilcher
- Serrano Academy