I need to read the rest of McWhorter's extent monographs to properly place this on a spectrum from Totally Casual Friendly to Actual Academic Monograph, but with only a few of them in my brain, this definitely cheats toward actual academic monograph. That said, it's still McWhorter. And it's him gleefully using footnotes to reference other academic works and great cartoons of the 1990s. So-- priceless!

The thesis is that language is naturally complicated. Any time you have a language that doesn't seem that complicated, it's because it's been through "the Persian Conversion"-- that is, a lot of adults had to learn it to speak with other adults and they had to do it pretty quickly. His acronym is IDIOM. Language is: Ingrown, Disheveled, Intricate, Oral, and Mixed. The less intricate, the more written down, the more blended with other language, the more likely it is to have been converted from some long ago tongue into something completely new. English isn't the only example and not even the grand daddy anymore, given that English continues to simply itself itself into easier, more succinct sub-languages/dialects (I need to read more of this by him, clearly!) like Black English (or what I would have referred to as AAVE, but I guess he does not prefer that term).

Of the 6,000 languages that we know of, about 200 are written down. We ought not to let those that get written define those that have not yet been.