Language pervades our world, the media, our relationships, minds and hearts. We learn it and we pass it on. In Tongues, Micheal O'Siadhail delights in language and shares its wonder and fascination. Like a genetic code, language brings human life over thousands of years into the present. It unites the personal and the social, allows for continuity and novelty and can arouse the strongest passions. O'Siadhail explores individual words, plays with grammar, and meditates on pictograms and the distilled meaning of proverbs across cultures. The variety of forms, from sonnets to complex rhyming and syllabic patterns, matches the thematic richness.