I was lucky to come across this book in the humanities bookstore of my local university. Every chapter has given me a mini "Eureka!" moment, which is very rare for a proceedings-style book.

In linguistics, it has long been taken as an axiom that all languages are equally complex. The chapters of this book all challenge this assumption. From showing that the idea itself arose in the late fifties, without any real quantitative or qualitative research behind it to back it up, to comparing two closely related languages (Elfdalian and Standard Swedish) and showing that one is definitely more complex than the other, to showing that languages (creoles, that is) grow more complex and can become so by overtly and analytically marking information that no other languages mark and not through growing inflections, to showing that literate registers grow out of formal registers, that in turn are more complex than informal registers, to discussing whether it makes sense at all to talk about "overall complexity" for any language... It is very tempting to whisper "paradigm shift".

This is certainly the most important book I have found so far this year, and possibly for several years to come. ( )