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Academic linguists are used to laymen assuming that we are professional polyglots—we are given to mimicking the eternal question "How many languages do you speak?" with affectionate exasperation. Many people also naturally assume that the linguist is a steward of the grammatical "pitfalls" one is taught to avoid, such as Billy and me for Billy and I—friends often joke that they feel like they need to "watch their grammar" around us.

Yet in reality, many linguists speak only one language, and not only are the tricky "blackboard grammar" rules irrelevant to what we do, but the very theoretical underpinnings of our field render them laughable little hoaxes. Mark Baker's The Atoms of Language is a welcome introduction to what many linguists are actually engaged in every day, helping to fill a glaring gap in the popular nonfiction literature until recently occupied only by Steven Pinker's bestseller, The Language Instinct.

Pinker built his presentation around the question of whether humans' ability to use language is innate. The book was masterfully written and provided an introduction to some fundamental tenets of modern linguistic theory. But the breadth of topics germane to the innateness argument, including data on infants' speech and language disorders, allowed for only brief consideration of the conception of grammatical structure with which Noam Chomsky revolutionized the linguistics field in the 1960s. Baker's is the first book aimed at a general readership that outlines the nuts and bolts of one of the main courses of current linguistics training and research—what is called the "Principles and Parameters" school.

The languages of the world differ in structure much more than is obvious from the typical American experience, where the languages we usually learn are relatives of English, thus built on a game plan familiar to us. For example, we all know that words for a given concept differ from language to language. But in the Native American language Mohawk (Baker's specialty), the entire sentence "He made the dress ugly for her" is expressed in a single word, Washakotya'tawitsherahetkvhta'se'.

Yet Baker's main point is that underlying the almost netherworldly appearance of a word like this are basic principles (i.e., those indicated in Principles and Parameters) that are constant across all of the world's languages, and that languages differ only according to a small set of binary choices as to how those principles will be expressed. A given pair of such alternate "settings" is a parameter in the Principles and Parameters framework.

For example, Baker shows that languages like Mohawk are built upon a parameter that requires that the entities that a verb in a sentence is driven by (i.e., the subject) or affects (e.g., its object) be hung on the verb itself rather than expressed as separate words as in English. Thus in the Mohawk word above, the -shako- part near the beginning is a prefix that means roughly "he acting upon her," incorporating what English would express with the separate pronouns he and her. The core of the whole word is the -hetkvht-, a verb meaning "to 'uglify,'" while the -tya'tawi- in the first half of the word means "dress." The whole word in a sense translates as "He dress-uglied her." While in English, words like baby-sit instead of sit the baby are relatively rare, in languages like Mohawk objects are regularly combined with verbs in this way. One "house-buys" rather than buying a house, and thus one "dress-uglifies" rather than uglifying the dress.

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