Immigrant Tongues: Exploring How Languages Moved, Evolved, and Defined Us (History of Language, Etymology Book)

by Patrick Foote

Overview

Tracing the Journey of Global Languages

Patrick Foote’s Immigrant Tongues is the ultimate language history book, blending stories of migration, culture, and evolution to uncover how languages have shaped our world. Perfect for fans of linguistics gifts and etymology dictionaries, this book combines the fascinating history of English language development with tales of other lingua francas and their profound global impact.

Discover how languages transform and adapt.

From the history of the English language’s arrival in the United States to the spread of Arabic across North Africa and the enduring legacy of the Latin language, Immigrant Tongues explores the journeys of tongues across continents. Each chapter delves into the origins of a language, the native tongues it encountered, and how it adapted and evolved in its new home. With a style that balances entertainment and depth, this linguistics book also highlights the cultural exchanges that enriched language along the way.

Uncover the stories behind linguistic diversity. Whether you’re intrigued by etymology gifts or searching for the perfect language book, this engaging narrative reveals the deep connections between geography, history, and the evolution of words. Explore the native languages spoken before immigrant tongues arrived, how languages like French and Māori transformed over time, and why some evolved into today’s modern lingua francas.

Inside, you’ll find:

• A detailed exploration of language origins and their journeys across the globe.
• Insight into how languages like English, Latin, and Arabic adapted to new cultural landscapes.
• Stories that deepen your appreciation for the interplay of linguistics and history.

Immigrant Tongues is more than a book—it’s a treasured gift for history buffs, etymology lovers, and anyone fascinated by how words have shaped our world. The perfect linguistics present, this book celebrates the power and beauty of human communication.

If you liked Why Do We Say That?, Dictionary of Word Origins, or The Origin of Names, Words and Everything in Between: Volume II, you’ll love Immigrant Tongues.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781684818150
Publisher:	Mango Media
Publication date:	08/12/2025
Pages:	234
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Patrick Foote was born in London but has since moved to Plymouth in the southwest of England. Patrick always enjoyed learning and has always had a particular interest in language and linguistics. This all resulted in the creation of his popular YouTube channel Name Explain, which started life focusing on uncovering the origins of names but now covers anything and everything language. Name Explain has been a huge success, becoming one of the most popular etymology and language channels on YouTube. When not making YouTube videos or wiring books he enjoys reading, playing board/video games, watching pro wrestling, walking, and wild swimming.

Read an Excerpt

WHERE ARE YOU FROM?

Whenever someone asks me the incredibly innocent question “Where are you from?” I am always left feeling a tad uncertain about my answer. I was born in London, moved to the small coastal town of Bognor Regis with my family when I was five, and in my mid twenties decided to pack up my life and move four hours away from most of my friends and family to Plymouth, a city I had spent no more than a couple weeks collectively exploring. So my answer to where I am from is kind of up for debate. I was born in one place, lived most of my life in another, and now live somewhere else entirely. The true answer to the question of where I call home I guess is “all of the above.” In the grand scheme of humanity, my three answers to this question are relatively tame. Others have called all different parts of the world home across their life. These are places where they made friends, planted their roots, and formed a life they love. Languages in many ways are resoundingly similar.

If you were to look at a map of our modern world and see the most widely spoken language in each nation, you would quickly notice that not every nation gets its own unique tongue. While France might speak French, and Japan Japanese, French can also be found across various parts of Africa. Meanwhile a language like Spanish (which unsurprisingly derives from Spain) is spoken by the majority of nations south of the US border. Then we have English, the language of my home nation, which has become a widely spoken language in every continent on the planet, even that big cold one in the south. These languages, like myself and many others, have found homes in places where they were once foreigners.

Since the inception of language, the tongues we speak have travelled with us far and wide. The journeys these languages have undertaken can in many cases be both wonderful and heartbreaking. Words that originated on a tiny island have gone on to be spoken by masses of people. In many cases, these languages are spoken by more people in different lands as opposed to where they originated from. In some rarer cases these languages are no longer even spoken in their place of origin. It’s easy to take for granted the spread of languages across the globe. For example, whenever I have had to prepare for a trip across the Atlantic to spend some time in the Land of the Free, remembering to pack a phrase book is never on my to-do list. I simply get off my however-many-hours long flight and carry on talking the way I do back in Blighty.

English of course didn’t just magically appear all of a sudden in the USA and become their primary tongue. Neither did Portuguese in Brazil, French in Cameroon, or Arabic in Egypt. These languages and many others journeyed past their homelands, across land, sea, and sky to cement themselves in their new homes. It is these journeys that we will be covering in this book. No two languages’ journeys are identical, but there are undoubtedly many similarities in these journeys. Many languages migrated slowly over time, finding themselves at home in new places so subtly, we barely think of them as immigrant tongues. Others however rocked up more or less overnight and quickly asserted their dominance, thanks to foreign powers wanting to claim land in parts of the world formerly unknown to them. Their languages finding new homes was often a byproduct of these exploitations. Due to this, foreign tongues have had varying success at finding new homes. In some cases, they are spoken across a huge portion of a continent, in many cases they become the go to language for a country, and on occasion they are spoken by a small community of people in a land. While we all know about the English and French spoken in Canada, the Welsh spoken by a pocket of Argentina flies much further under the radar. We’ll get to it, don’t worry.

It’s worth remembering that in most cases languages didn’t find new homes in empty lands. When the Spanish arrived in South America the continent already had ample tongues. A sad reality of many of these language journeys is the fact that in making themselves at home in new places they simultaneously displaced other languages, either greatly reducing their numbers of native speakers or killing them out entirely. This book is just as much about covering the languages that were already being spoken in these corners of the globe as it is about the foreign languages that found new homes.

If you hadn’t already noticed, some languages have immigrated far more than others. I have already mentioned English, Spanish, and French and this will definitely not be the last you hear of them. The reasons why languages like these western European ones became so globally spoken will become clear as you progress through this book. Though I imagine many of you will already have a pretty good understanding as to why this is the case.

Something else I really wish to highlight in this book is just how much many of these immigrant tongues have changed in their new homes. The English spoken in the USA and the English spoken in the UK are resoundingly different. As is the English spoken in Australia or New Zealand. A language can feature different words and phrases in its new home, ones that were never introduced or never really accepted back in their place of birth. In some cases languages have changed so much, they are actually classified as whole new languages. The technical term for these are daughter languages, and we delve into a few of them in this book too.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part 1: Early Migrations

• The Indo-European Language Family
  • The Germanic Branch: English, German, Dutch, Swedish, Icelandic, Afrikaans
  • The Romance Branch: French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian
  • The Balto-Slavic Branch: Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, Latvian, Lithuanian
  • The Celtic Branch: Welsh, Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Manx, Bretton
  • The Indo-Iranian Branch: Hindi, Persian, Sanskrit, Bengali
• The Uralic Language Family
  • The Ugric Branch: Hungarian
  • The Baltic-Finnic Branch: Finnish, Estonian
  • The Sami Branch: Northern Sami, Southern Sami, Ter Sami
• The Turkic Language Family
  • The Oghuz Branch: Turkish, Turkmen, Azerbaijani
  • The Karluk Branch: Uzbek
  • The Kipchak Branch: Kazakh

Part 2: The Age of Colonisation 

• The Atlantic-Congo Language Family
  • The Bantu Branch: Swahili, Zulu, Kirundi
  • The Volta-Niger Branch: Yoruba, Igbo
  • The Savannas Branch: Miyobe, Gur, Kulango
• The Afroasiatic Language Family
  • The Semitic Branch: Arabic, Hebrew, Maltese
  • The Berber Branch: Tuareg, Tashlhiyt, Shawiya, Kabyle
  • The Cushitic Branch:  Somali, Oromo, Beja
  • The Egyptian Branch: Old Egyptian, Middle Egyptian, Coptic
• The Sino-Tibetan Language Family
  • The Sinitic Branch: Mandarin, Jin/Cantonese, Wu, Yue
  • The Tibetic Branch: Standard Tibetan, Khams Tibetan, Amdolese
  • The Burmish Branch: Burmese, Achang, Zaiwa
• The Japonic Language Family
  • The Japanese Branch: Japanese
  • The Ryukyuan Branch: Okinawan, Miyako, Kikai

Part 3: New Imperialism and Beyond

• The Koreanic Language Family
  • The Korean Branch: Korean
  • The Jeju Branch: Jeju
• The Algic Language Family
  • The Algonquian Branch: Cree, Ojibwa, Arapaho, Cheyenne
  • The Yurok Branch: Yurok
  • The Wiyot Branch: Wiyot
• The Iroquoian Language Family
  • The Northern Iroquoian Branch: Mohawk, Seneca, Huronian
  • The Southern Iroquoian Branch: Cherokee
• The Uto-Aztecan Language Family
  • The Nahuan Branch: Nahuatl, Pipil
  • The Numic Branch: Comanche, Timbisha, Shoshoni
  • The Piman Branch: O’odham, Tepecano
• The Arawak Language Family
  • The Northern Branch: Taíno, Garifuna, Arawak, Piapoco
  • The Southern Branch: Ashaninca, Machiguenga, Iñapari
• The Quechuan Language Family
  • The Quechuan I Branch: Ancash, Huánuco, Yaru
  • The Quechuan II Branch: Cuzco, Cajamarca-Cañaris, Kichwa
• The Austroasiatic Language Family
  • The Vietic Branch: Vietnamese, Arem, Phong
  • The Khmer Branch: Khmer
  • The Munda Branch: Santali, Mundari, Ho
• The Austronesian Language Family
  • The Malayo-Polynesian Branch: Māori, Tongan, Hawaiian, Fijian, Malagasy
  • The Philippine Branch: Tagalog/Filipino
  • The Malayic Branch: Malay, Indonesian
• The Pama-Nyungan Language Family
  • The Paman Branch: Umpila, Koko-Bera
  • The Nyungan Branch: Noongar, Galaagu

Editorial Reviews

"Patrick has made me realise that even the most mundane and ubiquitous words can have an endlessly fascinating story." —Betty Chen, founder of ARTiculations

"Patrick has always had the unique ability to get you caring about things you didn't realize you cared about. This book will make you care about why you talk the way you talk."

—Mr. Beat, educational YouTuber and author of The Power of Our Supreme Court

From the Publisher