📚 Language and Languages

Linguistics’ broad shelf: diversity, typology, and the estimate of how many there are.

Below are the 30 works carrying the subject language and languages in the Open Library catalogue with the most editions in print. Author and first year are as the record states them; a missing year means the record does not carry one, not that the book is undated. Novels set in the subject are left out, because a list of historical fiction is not a list of history. Where one author dominates the reprint counts, no more than two of their titles appear.

Cover	Title	Author	First published	Editions
	Tractatus logico-philosophicus	Ludwig Wittgenstein	1921	212
	Sein und Zeit	Martin Heidegger	1927	115
	Κρατύλος	Plato	1931	48
	Philosophische Untersuchungen	Ludwig Wittgenstein	1953	40
	I Ching	Richard Wilhelm	1950	32
	The study of language	George Yule	1985	30
	Aesthetic	Benedetto Croce	1909	23
	Thinking Through Communication	Sarah Trenholm	2005	23
	Mass Communication	Ralph E. Hanson	2004	21
	My Next Life as a Villainess	Satoru Yamaguchi	2019	19
	Philosophy of language	William G. Lycan	1999	18
	An introduction to language	Victoria A. Fromkin	1974	16
	The loom of language	Frederick Bodmer	1943	15
	How to do things with words	J. L. Austin	1962	15
	Semiotica y Filosofia del Lenguaje	Umberto Eco	1983	13
	The tyranny of words	Stuart Chase	1938	12
	The Unfolding of Language	Guy Deutscher	2005	12
	The Stuff of Thought	Steven Pinker	2007	12
	Essais de linguistique générale	Roman Jakobson	1963	11
	With good reason	S. Morris Engel	1976	11
	Media literacy	W. James Potter	2010	11
	By the Grace of the Gods	Roy	2020	11
	A Mouthful of Air	Anthony Burgess	1992	10
	After Babel	George Steiner	1975	8
	Learning another language through actions	James J. Asher	1977	8
	An Introduction to Language	Robert Rodman	1988	8
	The Essential Chomsky	Noam Chomsky	2008	8
	Second Language Learning and Language Teaching	Vivian Cook	2013	8
	Choices & Connections	Steven McCornack	2014	8
	さよならも言えないうちに	川口俊和	2023	8

List built from Open Library (CC0 metadata) · retrieved 05 Nov 2026 UTC · capped at 30 works per subject.

Nearby shelves

LasersLatinLaundryLawLawnsLeadership

Want the ideas behind these books explained rather than listed? Try Study for short explainers, Academy for deeper tracks, and the periodic table or the night sky when the book is about matter or stars.