Linguistics books

The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World is a 2007 book by the anthropologist David W. Anthony, in which the author describes his "revised Kurgan theory." He explores the origins and spread of the Indo-European languages from the Pontic–Caspian steppe throughout Western Europe, Central Asia, and South Asia. He shows how the domesticated horse and the invention of the wheel mobilized the steppe herding societies in the Eurasian Steppe, and combined with the introduction of bronze technology and new social structures of patron-client relationships gave an advantage to the Indo-European societies. The book won the Society for American Archaeology's 2010 Book Award.

A slang dictionary is a reference book containing an alphabetical list of slang, which is vernacular vocabulary not generally acceptable in formal usage, usually including information given for each word, including meaning, pronunciation, and etymology. It can provide definitions on a range of slang from more mundane terms (like "rain check" or "bob and weave") to obscure sexual practices. Such works also can include words and phrases arising from different dialects and argots, which may or may not have passed into more common usage. They can also track the changing meaning of the terms over time and space, as they migrate and mutate.

Roger's Profanisaurus is a humorous book (and for a short period commencing 2011; mobile app), published in the United Kingdom by Dennis Publishing which is written in the style of a lexicon of profane words and expressions. The book is marketed as "the foulest-mouthed book ever to stalk the face of the earth".

The Etymological Dictionary of the Altaic Languages is a comparative and etymological dictionary of the hypothetical Altaic language family. It was written by linguists Sergei Starostin, Anna Dybo, and Oleg Mudrak [ru], and was published in Leiden in 2003 by Brill Publishers. It contains 3 volumes, and is a part of the Handbook of Oriental Studies: Section 8, Uralic and Central Asian Studies; no. 8.

Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew is a scholarly book written in the English language by linguist Ghil'ad Zuckermann, published in 2003 by Palgrave Macmillan. The book proposes a socio-philological framework for the analysis of "camouflaged borrowing" such as phono-semantic matching. It introduces for the first time a classification for "multisourced neologisms", new words that are based on two or more sources at the same time.

A History of the Pyu Alphabet (Burmese: ပျူအက္ခရာသမိုင်း) is a book on the Pyu language first published in 1963 by Tha Myat.

Decolonising the Mind: the Politics of Language in African Literature (Heinemann Educational, 1986), by the Kenyan novelist and post-colonial theorist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, is a collection of essays about language and its constructive role in national culture, history, and identity. The book, which advocates linguistic decolonization, is one of Ngũgĩ's best-known and most-cited non-fiction publications, helping to cement him as a preeminent voice theorizing the "language debate" in post-colonial studies.

The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross: A Study of the Nature and Origins of Christianity Within the Fertility Cults of the Ancient Near East is a 1970 book about the linguistics of early Christianity and fertility cults in the Ancient Near East. It was written by John Marco Allegro (1923–1988).

Modality is a non-fiction book by the semanticist Paul Portner. The book, first published by the Oxford University Press in 2009, lays out the basic problems in linguistic modality and some of the standard approaches to solving them.

The Mother Tongue is a 1990 book by Bill Bryson which compiles the history and origins of the English language and its various quirks. It is subtitled English And How It Got That Way. The book discusses the Indo-European origins of English, the growing status of English as a global language, the complex etymology of English words, the dialects of English, spelling reform, prescriptive grammar, and other topics including swearing. This account popularises the subject and makes it accessible to the lay reader, but it has been criticised for some inaccuracies, such as the perpetuation of several urban myths.