Language: The Cultural Tool [Paperback]

Daniel Everett is an authority on languages of the Amazon. In his book, "Language: The Cultural Tool," he uses this expertise to challenge the theories of famed language guru Noam Chomsky.

Chomsky maintains that children are born with a kind of universal language intuition. All of humanity, Chomsky would say, is therefore "hard-wired" to do language in certain definite ways.

Dr. Everett, who lived many years with the Pirahã tribe of Brazil, replies that human expression is not inherently pre-ordered. Rather, language is a unique cultural "tool," originated and modified by the culture in which it occurs.

The author cites varied modes of Pirahã speech--whistling, humming, and tonal devices--all of which are facets of the tribe's language. The Pirahã also have no words for numbers, and only minimal ways of describing color. Everett believes this is because the Pirahã culture perceives no need of expressing math or color differences. Therefore the tribe has devised its own unusual techniques of communication.

If you're intrigued by the many ways human beings can communicate, you'll like this book. (I read it in the Kindle version.)

I came to Everett's work via his first book, Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes where he describes his life as a missionary living amongst the Pirahã tribe in the Amazon jungle. As a nutritional anthropologist and author Deadly Harvest, I have lived with various native peoples for many years and, like Everett, have taken pains to speak and study deeply the local lingos.

I heard Everett speak at the LSE in London and was intrigued by the language dimension of his work with the Pirahã. This work has led him to take issue with the prevailing paradigm in linguistics, Chomsky's "Universal Grammar". This is the idea that humans are born with a brain prewired with a basic grammar `operating system'. This then runs the `program' (language) of the society into which the child is born. The eminent psycho-linguist Steven Pinker gave currency to these notions and brought them to the general public in his popular book The Language Instinct. This Chomskian view is often called `nativism' and the people who promote this view `nativists'.

This 'nativist' paradigm treats the ability to learn a language as something innate, it is a `biological tool', just as an eye is. This view predicts that ALL languages will share certain features of complex thinking like subordinate clauses (e.g. "I know that he is here"), recursion (e.g. "Mary knows that I know what her husband is thinking"), counting (e.g. "I have three children"), and sophisticated tenses like the conditional (e.g. "If I feel well, I will sing") or the perfect (e.g. "The girl had eaten the cookie before she ate her lunch").

The contrarian view is to say that language and its grammar is a skill we learn in order to survive in our cultural environment and in this respect it is a `cultural tool'. This view predicts that grammars will be as complex or as simple as the cultural environment requires, not more or less.

Everett finds, from his study of Pirahã and other Amazonian languages, that, fatally to the prevailing `nativist' hypothesis, they do not have features like recursion, subordinate clauses and so forth.

He uses a minimum of technical language and, where Everett does go into grammatical concepts, he explains them carefully so that the lay reader has no difficulty following them. All is illustrated with delightful anecdotes and misunderstandings with his Pirahã hosts.

For example, as a missionary he translated the gospels with their accounts of Jesus' doings. When the Pirahã learned that Everett didn't know Jesus personally, they couldn't grasp what or why he was telling them - in their culture you only talk about things you know first hand.

Mothers knew the names of all their children all right, but they had no concept, let alone the language, to express the actual number of children.

In claiming that language is a cultural tool, Everett is taking on the Universal Grammar establishment but, in a manner reminiscent of Origin of Species, he does so mildly (even humbly) yet fearlessly and persuasively. Interestingly, support for Everett's view is coming from linguistic experiments such as those carried out by Simon Kirby at the University of Edinburgh. They don't support `nativism' either but do support the idea that `culture is everything'.

Everett's killer point is this: The features and peculiarities of ALL languages, can be explained by their use of standard brain circuitry; moreover, languages are simply cultural tools adapted to their ecological niche. You don't need to postulate a brain module somehow pre-wired by evolution for a specialized Universal Grammar.

Read this book for a refreshing look at this fascinating field of linguistics. But there is a bonus. This is not a dry, academic work; it is suffused with humanity. There can be no finer testimony than to quote Everett's own words toward the end of the book:

"Like angst-free, realized existentialists, [the Pirahã] embrace the accomplishments of each day and find meaning in their lives without worrying about their children's future or what posterity will think of them. They stare into the eyes of death without blinking and live their physically demanding lives almost constantly laughing and smiling. Their happiness and their lack of worry, the absence of preoccupation with the past, their refusal to fear the future, these things have shaped their language so as to exclude talk about remote times, whether future or past, and to eschew numbers and counting, and to avoid complex sentences, because only people, things and events for which there is direct evidence can participate, placing the burden of their communications on their stories rather than their sentences. They reject career goals and enjoy each day as it comes."

The "universal grammar" or "bioprogram" hypothesis in linguistics is plausible but not sufficiently critically examined. One finds a short discussion in most textbooks, leading to the "obvious" conclusion, and one fears that the beginning student is simultaneously indoctrinated into the Chomskyan world and inoculated against the alternative point of view. "Language: The Cultural Tool" is an accurate title for Mr. Everett's extended meditation on the aspects of this problem. The author, an experienced field linguist/anthropologist, poses the alternative point of view without pressing doctrinaire conclusions on his readers.

This book is recommended for those with a passing interest in the theoretical question of the origin or evolution of language as well as for more technically trained readers, although I concede that the latter may find too many unnecessary explanations or metaphors have been included to make the ideas accessible to the lowest common denominator of reader. Despite the impression of unnecessary length, Mr. Everett has combined humility and subtlety in advancing the possibility of an alternative hypothesis, and peppered his essay with many concrete examples, especially from his personal experience in Amazonian languages.

As persuasive as the arguments in favor of Chomskyan nativism may be, there really is no scientific evidence that conclusively establishes it. Perhaps there cannot be for the foreseeable future. But Mr. Everett does an admirable job of sketching how it might be that language is not spawned by language-specific genetic hardware but rather caused by more general cognitive and social structures.

If you are interested in these topics, make sure also to read Derek Bickerton's excellent forays into the subject.