Like other tools, language was invented, can be reinvented or lost, and shows significant variation across cultures. It's as essential to survival as fire - and, like fire, is found in all human societies. Language presents the bold and controversial idea that language is not an innate component of the brain, as has been famously argued by Chomsky and Pinker. Rather, it's a cultural tool which varies much more across different societies than the innateness view suggests.Fusing adventure, anthropology, linguistics and psychology, and drawing on Everett's pioneering research with the Amazonian Pirahãs, Language argues that language is embedded within - and is inseparable from - its specific culture. This book is like a fire that will generate much light. And much heat.
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Review
'The most important - and provocative - anthropological field work ever undertaken'
--Tom Wolfe, author of Bonfire of the Vanities
'A very good read ... a most lively introduction' --THES
'Courageous ... innovative and revealing' --Pragmatics and Cognition
'A very good read ... a most lively introduction' --Thes
--Tom Wolfe, author of Bonfire of the Vanities
'A very good read ... a most lively introduction' --THES
'Courageous ... innovative and revealing' --Pragmatics and Cognition
'A very good read ... a most lively introduction' --Thes
Book Description
A groundbreaking and controversial new theory about how we talk
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
By C. Young
Format:Paperback
An entertaining and convincing riposte both to Noam Chomsky's notion of 'universal grammar' which has dominated linguistics for decades and Steven Pinker's populist 'language instinct'. Both so-called 'nativist' theories claim the capacity and underlying language structure is somehow genetically 'programmed in' to the human brain, and that the difference between for example Japanese and German are so superficial to be hardly worth studying. Above all, Chomsky and Pinker argue that culture is of minimal importance to the structure of languages.
Everett refutes this almost completely, basing his case on his own decades-long fieldwork with the Pirahã people of the Amazon and the emerging evidence from a wide range of other researchers that culture is vitally important to language formation. Everett argues that language is a tool, highly adapted to a particular culture and well capable of having evolved from non-language cognitive skills. There was simply never any need to evolve a 'language instinct' and it is the actually the culturally-contextualised differences between languages, not their underlying similarities (which may be due more to basic cognitive processes than genetics anyway) that help us understand how human language works.
It is an enthralling and emotional tale, unfortunately often undermined by a sprawling structure that sometimes reads like the jumbled lecture notes of a rather good undergraduate course, complete with frequent repetitions for the slower student. The argument clearly wins on points but I felt needed a tighter, more focused approach to land a knock-out blow.
Everett refutes this almost completely, basing his case on his own decades-long fieldwork with the Pirahã people of the Amazon and the emerging evidence from a wide range of other researchers that culture is vitally important to language formation. Everett argues that language is a tool, highly adapted to a particular culture and well capable of having evolved from non-language cognitive skills. There was simply never any need to evolve a 'language instinct' and it is the actually the culturally-contextualised differences between languages, not their underlying similarities (which may be due more to basic cognitive processes than genetics anyway) that help us understand how human language works.
It is an enthralling and emotional tale, unfortunately often undermined by a sprawling structure that sometimes reads like the jumbled lecture notes of a rather good undergraduate course, complete with frequent repetitions for the slower student. The argument clearly wins on points but I felt needed a tighter, more focused approach to land a knock-out blow.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
This book is incredibly interesting. I'm a linguistics student and it really filled in some of the gaps in my thinking about the possibility of linguistic innateism and the ontogenesis of language.
The tone of the book is very easy to understand and full of anecdotes, yet not dumbed down which is not easy to achieve! Loved this book and have recommended it to lots of my friends.
The tone of the book is very easy to understand and full of anecdotes, yet not dumbed down which is not easy to achieve! Loved this book and have recommended it to lots of my friends.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
By Johnn Dwyer
Format:Paperback
A brilliantly written exposition of one of the discipline's most ambitious projects - an anthropological linguistic account of an amazing language, which, according to the claims made by the essentializing ideology of generativism, suffices as falsification of an outdated theory. In place of the old theory comes a rich, multifaceted, emergent account of language as it really is - a product of the world speakers live in, a miracle of cognitive adaptability. Linguistics has reached a tipping point. To understand language, it is time to stop navel-gazing, and look outwards into the world. thank you Daniel Everett for this timely book.
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4.8 out of 5 stars
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
Fascinating but not a strong thread of argument
I am three-quarters of the way through this very absorbing book. It is packed with material about linguistics and the cultural element of language, most of which was new to me and... Read more
Published 1 month ago by J. Heritage
2.0 out of 5 stars
Weakly argued, disappointing
I'm not a professional linguist, but I work with (and create) computational languages of the sort described by classical Chomskyan theory, and have many sympathies with it as a... Read more
Published 7 months ago by Thomas Beale
2.0 out of 5 stars
"Pirahã language: The Cultural Tool"
This book was an impulse buy after having seen it in my local Waterstone's. I'm very interested in language and linguistics, but I wasn't entirely sure what to expect from this... Read more
Published 11 months ago by S
2.0 out of 5 stars
Disappointingly basic
Perhaps my expectations were set too high, but "Language: The Cultural Tool" is written in a disappointingly simple way, aimed at people with little understanding of linguistics. Read more
Published 12 months ago by kiki
4.0 out of 5 stars
Academic but very good
This book is quite academic and so could be quite-hard going for people with no background in Lingusitics. Read more
Published 13 months ago by RJS
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