Is Language Innate or Learned?
A language is a system of symbols strung together to communicate thought. Equipped with language, we can share understandings, pass experience and knowledge from one generation to the next, and make plans for the future. In short, language allows culture to develop. Consequently, sociologists commonly think of language as a cultural invention that distinguishes humans from other animals.
Yet MIT cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, a leading figure in the biological onslaught on the social sciences, says culture has little to do with our acquisition of language. In his view, “people know how to talk in more or less the sense that spiders know how to spin webs.” Language, says Pinker, is an “instinct.”
Pinker bases his radical claim on the observation that most people can easily create and understand sentences that have never been uttered before. We even invent countless new words (including the word “countless,” which was invented by William Shakespeare). We normally develop this facility quickly and without formal instruction at an early age. This suggests that people have a sort of innate recipe or grammar for combining words in patterned ways. Pinker supports his case by discussing cases of young children with different language backgrounds who were brought together in settings as diverse as Hawaiian sugar plantations in the 1890s and Nicaraguan schools for the deaf in the 1970s and who spontaneously created their own language system and grammatical rules.
If children are inclined to create grammars spontaneously at a young age, we can also point to seats of language in the brain; damage to certain parts of the brain impairs one’s ability to speak although intelligence is unaffected. Moreover, scientists have identified a gene that may help wire these seats of language into place. A few otherwise healthy children fail to develop language skills. They find it hard to articulate words and they make a variety of grammatical errors when they speak. If these language disorders cannot be attributed to other causes, they are diagnosed as Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Recently it was discovered that a mutation of a gene known as FOXP2 is associated with SLI. Only when the gene is normal do children acquire complex language skills at an early age. From these and similar observations, Pinker concludes that language is not so much learned as it is grown. Should we believe him?
From a sociological point of view, there is nothing problematic about the argument that we are biologically pre-wired to acquire language and create grammatical speech patterns. What is sociologically interesting, however, is how the social environment gives form to these predispositions. We know, for example, that young children go through periods of rapid development, and if they do not interact symbolically with others during these critical periods, their language skills remain permanently impaired. This suggests that our biological potential must be unlocked by the social environment to be fully realized. Language must be learned. The environment is in fact such a powerful influence on language acquisition that even a mutated FOXP2 gene doesn’t seal one’s linguistic fate. Up to half of children with SLI recover fully with intensive language therapy.
In an obvious sense, all language is learned even though our potential for learning and the structure of what we can learn is rooted in biology. Our use of language depends on which language communities we are part of. You say tomāto and I say tomăto, but Luigi says pomodoro and Shoshanna says agvaniya. But what exactly is the relationship between our use of language, the way we think, and our social environment? Let me now turn to just that question.
In the 1930s, linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf first proposed that experience, thought, and language interact in what came to be known as the Sapir-Whorf thesis. The Sapir-Whorf thesis holds that we experience certain things in our environment and form concepts about those things. We then develop language to express our concepts. Finally, language itself influences how we see the world.
Whorf saw speech patterns as “interpretations of experience." This seems uncontroversial. The Garo of Burma, a rice-growing people, distinguish many types of rice. Nomadic Arabs have more than 20 different words for camel. Verbal distinctions among types of rice and camels are necessary for different groups of people because these objects are important in their environment. As a matter of necessity, they distinguish among many different types of what we may regard as “the same” object. Similarly, terms that apparently refer to the same things or people may change to reflect a changing reality. For example, a committee used to be headed by a “chairman.” Then when women started entering the paid labor force in large numbers in the 1960s and some of them became committee heads, the term changed to “chairperson” or simply “chair.” In such cases, we see clearly how the environment or experience influences language.
It is equally uncontroversial to say that people must think before they can speak. Anyone who has struggled for just the right word or rewritten a sentence to phrase a thought more precisely knows this.
The controversial part of the Sapir-Whorf thesis is this: In what sense does language in and of itself influence the way we experience the world? In the first wave of studies based on the Sapir-Whorf thesis, researchers focused on whether speakers of different languages perceive color in different ways. By the 1970s, they concluded that they did not. People who speak different languages may have a different number of basic color terms, but everyone with normal vision is able to see the full visible spectrum. There are two words for blue in Russian and only one in English, but this does not mean that English speakers are somehow handicapped in their ability to distinguish shades of blue.
In the 1980s and 1990s, researchers found some effects of language on perception. For example, the German word for key is masculine while the Spanish word for key is feminine. When German and Spanish speakers are asked to describe keys, German speakers tend to use words like “hard,” “heavy,” and “jagged” while Spanish speakers use words such as “lovely,” “shiny,” and “shaped.” Apparently, the gender of the noun in and of itself influences how people see the thing to which the noun refers. Still, the degree to which language itself influences thought is a matter of controversy. Some men use terms like “fox,” “babe,” “bitch,” “ho,” and “doll” to refer to women. These terms are deeply offensive to many people. They certainly reflect and reinforce underlying inequalities between women and men. Some people assert that these terms in and of themselves influence people to think of women simply as sexual objects, but social scientists have yet to demonstrate the degree to which they do so.
I conclude that biological thinking about culture has both benefits and dangers. On the one hand, biology helps us see more clearly the broad limits and potentials of human creativity. On the other hand, some scholars have managed to get themselves trapped in a biological straight jacket. They fail to appreciate how the social environment unlocks biological potentials and how it creates enormous variation in the cultural expression of those potentials. Analyzing culture in all its variety and showing how cultural variations are related to variations in social structure are jobs for the sociologist.
Yet MIT cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, a leading figure in the biological onslaught on the social sciences, says culture has little to do with our acquisition of language. In his view, “people know how to talk in more or less the sense that spiders know how to spin webs.” Language, says Pinker, is an “instinct.”
Pinker bases his radical claim on the observation that most people can easily create and understand sentences that have never been uttered before. We even invent countless new words (including the word “countless,” which was invented by William Shakespeare). We normally develop this facility quickly and without formal instruction at an early age. This suggests that people have a sort of innate recipe or grammar for combining words in patterned ways. Pinker supports his case by discussing cases of young children with different language backgrounds who were brought together in settings as diverse as Hawaiian sugar plantations in the 1890s and Nicaraguan schools for the deaf in the 1970s and who spontaneously created their own language system and grammatical rules.
If children are inclined to create grammars spontaneously at a young age, we can also point to seats of language in the brain; damage to certain parts of the brain impairs one’s ability to speak although intelligence is unaffected. Moreover, scientists have identified a gene that may help wire these seats of language into place. A few otherwise healthy children fail to develop language skills. They find it hard to articulate words and they make a variety of grammatical errors when they speak. If these language disorders cannot be attributed to other causes, they are diagnosed as Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Recently it was discovered that a mutation of a gene known as FOXP2 is associated with SLI. Only when the gene is normal do children acquire complex language skills at an early age. From these and similar observations, Pinker concludes that language is not so much learned as it is grown. Should we believe him?
From a sociological point of view, there is nothing problematic about the argument that we are biologically pre-wired to acquire language and create grammatical speech patterns. What is sociologically interesting, however, is how the social environment gives form to these predispositions. We know, for example, that young children go through periods of rapid development, and if they do not interact symbolically with others during these critical periods, their language skills remain permanently impaired. This suggests that our biological potential must be unlocked by the social environment to be fully realized. Language must be learned. The environment is in fact such a powerful influence on language acquisition that even a mutated FOXP2 gene doesn’t seal one’s linguistic fate. Up to half of children with SLI recover fully with intensive language therapy.
In an obvious sense, all language is learned even though our potential for learning and the structure of what we can learn is rooted in biology. Our use of language depends on which language communities we are part of. You say tomāto and I say tomăto, but Luigi says pomodoro and Shoshanna says agvaniya. But what exactly is the relationship between our use of language, the way we think, and our social environment? Let me now turn to just that question.
In the 1930s, linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf first proposed that experience, thought, and language interact in what came to be known as the Sapir-Whorf thesis. The Sapir-Whorf thesis holds that we experience certain things in our environment and form concepts about those things. We then develop language to express our concepts. Finally, language itself influences how we see the world.
Whorf saw speech patterns as “interpretations of experience." This seems uncontroversial. The Garo of Burma, a rice-growing people, distinguish many types of rice. Nomadic Arabs have more than 20 different words for camel. Verbal distinctions among types of rice and camels are necessary for different groups of people because these objects are important in their environment. As a matter of necessity, they distinguish among many different types of what we may regard as “the same” object. Similarly, terms that apparently refer to the same things or people may change to reflect a changing reality. For example, a committee used to be headed by a “chairman.” Then when women started entering the paid labor force in large numbers in the 1960s and some of them became committee heads, the term changed to “chairperson” or simply “chair.” In such cases, we see clearly how the environment or experience influences language.
It is equally uncontroversial to say that people must think before they can speak. Anyone who has struggled for just the right word or rewritten a sentence to phrase a thought more precisely knows this.
The controversial part of the Sapir-Whorf thesis is this: In what sense does language in and of itself influence the way we experience the world? In the first wave of studies based on the Sapir-Whorf thesis, researchers focused on whether speakers of different languages perceive color in different ways. By the 1970s, they concluded that they did not. People who speak different languages may have a different number of basic color terms, but everyone with normal vision is able to see the full visible spectrum. There are two words for blue in Russian and only one in English, but this does not mean that English speakers are somehow handicapped in their ability to distinguish shades of blue.
In the 1980s and 1990s, researchers found some effects of language on perception. For example, the German word for key is masculine while the Spanish word for key is feminine. When German and Spanish speakers are asked to describe keys, German speakers tend to use words like “hard,” “heavy,” and “jagged” while Spanish speakers use words such as “lovely,” “shiny,” and “shaped.” Apparently, the gender of the noun in and of itself influences how people see the thing to which the noun refers. Still, the degree to which language itself influences thought is a matter of controversy. Some men use terms like “fox,” “babe,” “bitch,” “ho,” and “doll” to refer to women. These terms are deeply offensive to many people. They certainly reflect and reinforce underlying inequalities between women and men. Some people assert that these terms in and of themselves influence people to think of women simply as sexual objects, but social scientists have yet to demonstrate the degree to which they do so.
I conclude that biological thinking about culture has both benefits and dangers. On the one hand, biology helps us see more clearly the broad limits and potentials of human creativity. On the other hand, some scholars have managed to get themselves trapped in a biological straight jacket. They fail to appreciate how the social environment unlocks biological potentials and how it creates enormous variation in the cultural expression of those potentials. Analyzing culture in all its variety and showing how cultural variations are related to variations in social structure are jobs for the sociologist.
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