Language is perhaps humanity's most astonishing accomplishment and one that remains poorly understood. Upending centuries of scholarship (including, most recently, Chomsky and Pinker) this book shows how people learn to talk not by acquiring fixed meanings and rules, but by picking up, reusing, and recombining countless linguistic fragments in novel ways. Drawing on entertaining and persuasive examples from across the world the book explains, amongst other things: how our short-lived memory copes with the on-rushing deluge of sound that is everyday speech, why it is that language is such a challenge for language scientists but learnt effortlessly by toddlers, how language gave us a big brain and changed the course of evolution, and ultimately, why all we know about language should give us hope.