Human Language Series, Part 1:

¶ … Human Language Series, Part 1:

Is language innate?

All day long, from when we get up in the morning to when we go to bed, even when we dream, our minds are producing language in some way or another. We are linguistic beings, whether we are in dialogue with ourselves, listening and speaking with others, or even receiving electronic or print media. But given that most of us cannot remember a time when our consciousness was not organized by language, how can we determine if the ability and/or need to use language is innate to the human brain? Starting in 1957, Noam Chomsky reframed the traditional study of language in his book Syntactic Structures, which shifted the focus of linguistics away from language as it existed to the question of why it exists. Chomsky believed the biologically-wired nature of the human mind enabled humans to produce language under the correct environmental (learning and cultural) conditions. Key to language is the production of new meanings within a sent of governed 'rules' or acceptable grammatical structures and sounds.

Different languages have different rules for word production, calling somewhat into question the idea that all languages are infinitely flexible in their creativity. For example, languages may have words with meanings not shared by other languages. In other words, English and Eskimo may not just have different words for 'snow,' but will have words not present in the other linguistic system. There is a single Eskimo word that means "Don't you want to go window shopping with me" with no corresponding single word in English. Thus although all languages may be uniquely creative, and in English we daily create sentences that have never existed before, but grammatically and conceptually all languages are not all creative in the same way.

At the core of language is the notion of syntax, or linking sounds to meaning. In language, words can occur in any order (boy, kick, ball) but to make meaning, the words must occur within a particular order within a particular fashion to convey a specific meaning in time. In real time, the elements occur all at once, thus the rules of language are independent of meaning. A sentence can be grammatical but meaningless, or meaningless but grammatical. Syntax, although it varies from language to language, is what makes language uniquely 'human,' no other animal species uses syntax in its communication system. No matter how different our language systems may seem to one another, all human language systems are more similar to one another than to animal systems of communication. Animals do not communicate on a conceptual level, and their language exists only in time. Human language can convey absence, like the fact there is 'no giraffe next to me,' and people who know a language can figure out the meaning of new words by the place of the word and the meaning of other words in a sentence. Language also changes and grows over time, and within the life of the individual, the capacity of a child to develop new and unique language skills far surpasses that of an animal during its lifetime.

No matter how broad the range of concepts a particular language system can communicate, however, there are many things languages cannot communicate even 'within' themselves, like relative, subjective ideas -- what is a 'leafy' tree to one person, versus another person's perception of the amount? A picture is likely to be worth a thousand words when describing a face and a map is more useful when conveying directions.