An Introduction to Language offers an engaging guide to the nature of language, focusing on how language works - its sounds, words, structures, and phrases - all investigated through wide-ranging examples from Old English to contemporary pop culture. * Explores the idea of a scientific approach to language, inviting students to consider what qualities of language comprise everyday skills for us, be they sounds, words, phrases, or conversation * Helps shape our understanding of what language is, how it works, and why it is both elegantly complex and essential to who we are * Includes exercises within each chapter to help readers explore key concepts and directly observe the patterns that are part of all human language * Examines linguistic variation and change to illustrate social nuances and language-in-use, drawing primarily on examples from English * Avoids linguistic jargon, focusing instead on a broader and more general approach to the study of language, and making it ideal for those coming to the subject for the first time * Supported by additional web resources - available upon publication at www.wiley.com/go/hazen/introlanguage - including student study aids and testbank and notes for instructors