Language: The Cultural Tool [Hardcover]

Daniel L. Everett (Author)

Book Description

Release date: March 13, 2012

A bold and provocative study that presents language not as an innate component of the brain—as most linguists do—but as an essential tool unique to each culture worldwide.
 
For years, the prevailing opinion among academics has been that language is embedded in our genes, existing as an innate and instinctual part of us. But linguist Daniel Everett argues that, like other tools, language was invented by humans and can be reinvented or lost. He shows how the evolution of different language forms—that is, different grammar—reflects how language is influenced by human societies and experiences, and how it expresses their great variety.
 
For example, the Amazonian Pirahã put words together in ways that violate our long-held under-standing of how language works, and Pirahã grammar expresses complex ideas very differently than English grammar does. Drawing on the Wari’ language of Brazil, Everett explains that speakers of all languages, in constructing their stories, omit things that all members of the culture understand. In addition, Everett discusses how some cultures can get by without words for numbers or counting, without verbs for “to say” or “to give,” illustrating how the very nature of what’s important in a language is culturally determined.
 
Combining anthropology, primatology, computer science, philosophy, linguistics, psychology, and his own pioneering—and adventurous—research with the Amazonian Pirahã, and using insights from many different languages and cultures, Everett gives us an unprecedented elucidation of this society-defined nature of language. In doing so, he also gives us a new understanding of how we think and who we are.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Language: The Cultural Tool, full of intellectually omnivorous insights and reminiscences about Everett’s years with the Pirahã . . . is that rare thing: a warm linguistics book. . . . A useful study of a burgeoning theory compatible with Darwinism, anthropology, psychology and philosophy—an interdisciplinary orientation the Chomskyans have largely spurned.”
—The New York Times Book Review
 
“Ambitious. . . . [Everett] doesn’t shy from making big claims.”
—The New York Times

“[Language] deserves a serious reading.”
—The Economist
 
“[Everett’s book] is revelatory. There is nothing about humans that is quite as astonishing as language.”
—The Guardian (London)
 
“Everett has . . . produced a book whose importance is almost impossible to overstate. This is an intellectual cri de Coeur and a profound celebration of human diversity. After reading it, you will—should—care as much about disappearing languages as you do about the clubbed seal or the harpooned whale. . . . A very rich but also very readable book. Everett is not the first to challenge the reign of Chomsky, but he is the most accessible, and, thanks to his years in Amazonia, the most-intimately informed.”
—The Sunday Times (London)

“A must-read for anyone having an interest in knowing what makes us human. . . .  Everett resets the research agenda for linguistics, psychology, and neuroscience towards finding out how our biological endowment and culture interact, to form and shape the rich diversity apparent as we view the human condition.”
—Philip Lieberman, Fred M. Seed Professor of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences, Professor of Anthropology, Brown University
 
“Everett mounts an impassioned argument that language has adaptively emerged as our species’ ‘tool’ for achieving social collectivity via discourse. He sharply questions today’s doctrinal wisdom in the field of linguistics by giving it a pendulum-push back in the direction of anthropology, of Humboldtian cosmography, and of humanity’s evolved socio-cognitive diversity.”
—Michael Silverstein, Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology, of Linguistics, and of Psychology, University of Chicago
 
“A radical reassessment of the origin and evolution of language. . . . The book eloquently reminds us that the incredible diversity of languages on this planet reflect different ways of thinking and being in the world—a phenomenon that might sadly be on the verge of extinction.”
—Robert Greene, author of The 50th Law and The Descent of Power
 
“For the past half-century, linguistic theory has been dominated by the idea that language is a biologically determined instinct. Daniel Everett argues instead that language is a cultural tool, no different in principle from the physical tools that people have invented in adapting to different physical and cultural environments. The sheer diversity of the world’s 7,000 or so languages strongly challenges any notion of a universal grammar, and suggests instead that languages are the product of general human intelligence, adaptability, and creativity. Everett draws on a wide knowledge of diverse languages and cultures, a deep knowledge of the history of ideas, and above all on his experiences in living among the remote Pirahã people in the Amazon. This is the most recent and most eloquent account of a remarkable sea change that is taking place in our understanding of the nature of human language.”
—Michael Corballis, author of The Recursive Mind: The Origins of Human Language, Thought, and Civilization, and professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Auckland
 
“This is exciting work.  I learned a tremendous amount from it, as will anyone who is concerned with the nature of language and of mind.”
—Robert Brandom, University of Pittsburgh Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
 
“Margaret Mead among the Samoans; Franz Boas among the Inuit; Bronislaw Malinowski among the Trobriand Islanders; Claude Lévi-Strauss among the Bororo and Guaycuru; Ruth Benedict among the Zuni, Dobu, and Kwakiutls—but to my mind Daniel Everett has now outdone them all. Language: The Cultural Tool, coming upon the heels of Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, establishes his thirty years with the Pirahã deep in the Amazon as the most important—and provocative—anthropological field work ever undertaken.”
—Tom Wolfe, author of Hooking Up

“Controversial and leavened with wit, this is the book on language I have been waiting for. A masterpiece, and then some.”
—Patricia S. Churchland, professor emerita of philosophy, University of California, San Diego

About the Author

Daniel L. Everett is dean of arts and sciences at Bentley University. He has held appointments in linguistics and/or anthropology at the University of Campinas, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Manchester, and Illinois State University.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon; 1 edition (March 13, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307378535
• ISBN-13: 978-0307378538
• Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 1.6 x 9.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #390,146 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Dan Everett (1951) was born in Holtville, California. He has worked in the Amazon jungles of Brazil for over 30 years, among more than one dozen different tribal groups. He is best-known for his long-term work on the Pirahã language. He has published more than 90 articles and six books on linguistic theory and the description of endangered Amazonian languages. His most recent book, Don't sleep, there are snakes: life and language in the Amazonian jungle (Pantheon), was selected by National Public Radio as one of the best books of 2009 in the US, by Blackwell's bookstores as one of the best of 2009 in the UK , and was an 'editor's choice' of the London Sunday Times. It was also a featured BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. His book, Language: The cultural tool (Pantheon), was a New York Times Editor's Choice .

A documentary of his life and work, The Grammar of Happiness, was released worldwide in 2012. It is available through the Smithsonian Channel in the USA. The Grammar of Happiness has now won first prize for Human Sciences at the Jackson Hole Film Festival. It won the Young Europeans Jury Award at the FIPA Film Festival in Biarritz, France. It is a finalist for best science film of 2012 at the Pariscience Film Festival.

A screenplay based on Don't sleep, There are Snakes is in progress, commissioned from two production companies, for a feature film. Everett is currently Dean of Arts and Sciences at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars From the Amazon Jungle: An Intriguing Riposte to Universal Grammar May 23, 2012

By Geoff Bond

Format:Hardcover

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 Pirahă 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 Pirahă. 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 Pirahă 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 Pirahă hosts.

For example, as a missionary he translated the gospels with their accounts of Jesus' doings. When the Pirahă 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 Pirahă] 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."

22 of 24 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Language takes many paths according to need March 29, 2012

By KmVictorian VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

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 Pirahă 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 Pirahă speech--whistling, humming, and tonal devices--all of which are facets of the tribe's language. The Pirahă also have no words for numbers, and only minimal ways of describing color. Everett believes this is because the Pirahă 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.)

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Good, refreshing, non-technical book from an expert May 27, 2012

By Seoigheach

Format:Hardcover

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.