Beginning with primitive man's first crude attempts at communication by sound, Dr Barber traces the development over thousands of years of organized language and its various families.

From the language groups emerging through the centuries he concentrates on the Indo-European as being of particular interest and describes the growth of the English language as we know it today. From each epoch - Old-English, Middle English, the tomes of Chaucer, of Shakespeare, and later - he introduces pleasing examples of prose and verse to illustrate his arguments.