McWhorter, a linguistics professor at University of California, Berkeley while writing The Power of Babel, first discovered his love of languages as a child hearing Hebrew spoken for the first time.

[7] As this primordial tongue came into being it also underwent immediate change, eventually resulting in roughly 6,000 individual languages worldwide as of the early 21st century, none of which sound like what those first humans would have used.

[9] McWhorter laments the fact that every two weeks one of those 6,000 languages "dies", either by losing its usefulness or its last living speaker, and he reports one estimate that by the beginning of the next century, 90% of the earth's tongues could become extinct.

[10][11] Having described his reasoning for the benefits of the existence of many varied world languages as well as the danger many of them face from the "encroachments of global capitalism", McWhorter implores his fellow linguists to do their part to save them.

Writing for the Los Angeles Times, linguist Geoffrey Nunberg called it "entertaining and informative" while admitting that he is not quite as enthusiastic as McWhorter about the ongoing semantic changes in the English language.

[9][11] The New Statesman's Kathryn Hughes enjoyed that the book could be read either as an impressive summary of the past half-century of linguistic research or as a trove of fascinating trivia, but criticized McWhorter's casual writing style and occasional factual error.