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First, welcome.
In my stack, but not read yet is a book by the same author as one of Martha and Grant's gift list picks:
The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention
Guy Deutscher
Their recommendations are found here, but none of them deals with the history of language:
Recommendations
I found Arika Okrent's book "In the Land of Invented Languages" absolutely fascinating. Parallel to the "natural" evolution of human language, there have been close to a thousand attempts to devise a truly universal language. I'm not just talking about Esperanto, but symbolic languages as well. Here's some links you might find interesting:
In the Land of Invented Languages: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arika_Okrent
Blissymbolics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blissymbols
And, of course, you might know the story about how Gene Roddenberry hired a professional linguist to create a self-consistent vocabulary for the Klingon language in his Star Trek universe.
Glenn and Heimhenge recommended great books on language in general, which seems to be what you asked for. If you want some easy, and sometimes humorous, reading on the origins of English and American English, I'd like to suggest Bill Bryson's The Mother Tongue and Made in America. The former particularly and wonderfully explains the emergence of English as the standard global language by reviewing, as Bryson tends to do, all the currently-accepted, peer-reviewed literature (though it was written in the 1990s, I think the research still mostly holds).
Martha Barnette
Grant Barrett
Grant Barrett
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