In The Language Game: How improvisation created language and changed the world, Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater discuss the evolution of language, the different theories about how language developed and offer their own solution to the problem.

Their central argument is that language is mostly improvised in the moment, using our past experience and memory to create new patterns of speech that meet the moment. They draw together the links between language and culture as drivers of the development of human societies, helping to shape the way we think and behave.

This book is for anyone interested in language, psychology, anthropology or semiotics (and related disciplines) and is sure to make you rethink some of your most basic assumptions about human’s most powerful invention.