List Price: $20.00 Details

Save: $4.05 (20%)

Get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime & FREE Returns

FREE delivery: Friday, Nov 19 on orders over $25.00 shipped by Amazon. Details

Fastest delivery: Wednesday, Nov 17
Order within 5 hrs and 49 mins Details

Only 10 left in stock (more on the way).

As an alternative, the Kindle eBook is available now and can be read on any device with the free Kindle app.

$$15.95 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details

Secure transaction

Ships from

Amazon.com

Sold by

Amazon.com

Details

Ships from

Amazon.com

Sold by

Amazon.com

Return policy: Returnable until Jan 31, 2022

Add a gift receipt for easy returns

FREE delivery: Nov 19 - 26

Used: Very Good | Details

Sold by Hippo Books

Share <Embed>

Other Sellers on Amazon

$11.91
+ $3.99 shipping

Sold by: Ambis Enterprises

$11.99
+ $7.63 shipping

Sold by: surpluscomputerbooks

$16.45
+ $3.99 shipping

Sold by: Cost-Cutters-R-US

Flip to back Flip to front

Listen Playing... Paused You're listening to a sample of the Audible audio edition.
Learn more

See all 3 images

Follow the Authors

Derek Bickerton

Adam's Tongue: How Humans Made Language, How Language Made Humans Paperback – March 2, 2010

by Derek Bickerton (Author)

55 ratings

See all formats and editions

Price

New from

Used from

Kindle

"Please retry"

$11.99

—

Hardcover

"Please retry"

$6.40

—

$6.40

Paperback

"Please retry"

$15.95

$11.91

$4.00

Enhance your purchase

How language evolved has been called "the hardest problem in science." In Adam's Tongue, Derek Bickerton―long a leading authority in this field―shows how and why previous attempts to solve that problem have fallen short. Taking cues from topics as diverse as the foraging strategies of ants, the distribution of large prehistoric herbivores, and the construction of ecological niches, Bickerton produces a dazzling new alternative to the conventional wisdom.

Language is unique to humans, but it isn't the only thing that sets us apart from other species―our cognitive powers are qualitatively different. So could there be two separate discontinuities between humans and the rest of nature? No, says Bickerton; he shows how the mere possession of symbolic units―words―automatically opened a new and different cognitive universe, one that yielded novel innovations ranging from barbed arrowheads to the Apollo spacecraft.

Written in Bickerton's lucid and irreverent style, this book is the first to thoroughly integrate the story of how language evolved with the story of how humans evolved. Sure to be controversial, it will make indispensable reading both for experts in the field and for every reader who has ever wondered how a species as remarkable as ours could have come into existence.'

Print length

304 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Hill and Wang
Publication date

March 2, 2010
Dimensions

5.5 x 0.66 x 8.5 inches
ISBN-10

9780809016471
ISBN-13

978-0809016471
See all details

Frequently bought together

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1

W. Tecumseh Fitch
24
Paperback
30 offers from $39.84
John McWhorter
356
Paperback
92 offers from $4.50
Guy Deutscher
530
Paperback
77 offers from $3.99

Customers who bought this item also bought

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1

W. Tecumseh Fitch
24
Paperback
30 offers from $39.84
Daniel L. Everett
123
Paperback
22 offers from $13.80
K. Aaron Smith
53
Paperback
31 offers from $29.97
Michael Tomasello
29
Paperback
30 offers from $14.08

Special offers and product promotions

Create your FREE Amazon Business account to save up to 10% with Business-only prices and free shipping.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“An intensely felt, sometimes very funny and occasionally deeply impolite take on what are fast becoming the classic case studies for language evolution.” ―Christine Kenneally, New Scientist

“Derek Bickerton has long been a leading thinker concerning the evolution of language. In his latest book, Adam's Tongue, Bickerton relishes his role as agent provocateur, offering witty demolitions of rival theories, admitting past errors, and providing an invigorating defense of the construction of ecological niches as the new grand truth for the theory of language evolution.” ―Michael A. Arbib, Director, USC Brain Project, University of Southern California

“Bickerton skewers linguists, paleontologists, and animal behaviorists alike, reviews some of the currently popular neurobiological theories on language evolution, provides some mea culpa moments, and openly throws in a few just-so stories--and from this somewhat improbable mix comes a well-thought-out book, one that takes the reader logically through his arguments with wit and verve. Whether the reader eventually agrees with Bickerton's thesis in its entirety or not, he or she will find the hours devoted to this book time well spent.” ―Irene Pepp erberg, Professor of Psychology, Brandeis University, and author of Alex and Me

“The great puzzle of how human language evolved, and how it relates to animal communication, is tackled here with enthusiasm and directness by the always interesting Derek Bickerton. Being neither a complete gradualist nor a believer in Divine sparks, the author touches on all the issues and positions that are hotly debated today.” ―Frans de Waal, Professor of Psychology, Emory University, and author of Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are

“Why is it that humans--and only humans--acquired language? Nobody knows for sure, but nobody has thought longer or harder about such questions than Derek Bickerton. A tour de force!” ―Gary Marcus, Professor of Psychology, New York University, and author of Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind

“An accessible and engaging book on a very complex topic: the evolution of language.” ―Rebecca Bollen Manalac, Library Journal

“Reading Adam's Tongue is like stepping back into the classroom of a quirky, vibrant, impassioned thinker engaged in a most perplexing problem: How did language arise, and which came first: language or complex thought?” ―Christine Thomas, The Honolulu Advertiser

About the Author

Derek Bickerton is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of Hawaii. His book Bastard Tongues was published in 2008, and Adam’s Tongue in 2009.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0809016478
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Hill and Wang; First edition (March 2, 2010)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780809016471
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0809016471
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 10.1 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.66 x 8.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,169,648 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,787 in European Dramas & Plays
- #2,918 in Linguistics Reference
- #4,082 in Cognitive Psychology (Books)

Customer Reviews:
55 ratings

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Derek Bickerton

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Customer reviews

5 star		51%
4 star		17%
3 star		13%
2 star		10%
1 star		8%

How are ratings calculated?

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Steven T. Abell, author of "Days in Midgard: A Thousand Years On"

Sometimes rude, sometimes repetitive, but interesting.

Reviewed in the United States on June 22, 2017

Verified Purchase

Several reviewers here complain about Bickerton's occasionally nasty tone in this book, particularly regarding the ideas of his colleagues. But I think he gives an unintentional clue to what lies ahead early on, when he says he didn't have to write this book. He could, he says, have simply laid out by the pool with a pitcher of margaritas and blown the days away. And that may be just what he did here. Imagine yourself sitting out by the pool with one of the world's top linguists. Let him get a little liquored up, then listen to him hold forth without reservation on a topic that he clearly loves. This is how people actually talk about their work before someone tells them they have to clean things up for tomorrow's PowerPoint presentation at the office. In this case, we get the dirty version. It may be annoying from time to time, but it is also perhaps more fun overall.

This book is a little flatulent, often repetitive, sometimes can't figure out what its target ought to be. There are interesting suppositions that could easily be right. There are other aspects where I am sure he is either quite wrong, or just looking for answers in the wrong place because those are the only places he knows to look. If you demand *the* definitive answer to the question of where language came from, this book isn't it. But neither is any other book you're likely to read in any current lifetime. It is a good run at at least some of an answer, which will probably lead to more of an answer later on. That's how science works.

5 people found this helpful

Helpful

Steve Bivans

Most concise book on the topic

Reviewed in the United States on February 6, 2020

Verified Purchase

Not only does this book explain, in precise terms, the philosophical and scientific issues underlying the study of the origin of language, it employs language in a concise and plain manner, to propose a logical framework to answer the questions: “How and Why did our ancestors develop language? And, “Why haven’t Other species?” Absolute MUST READ.

2 people found this helpful

Helpful

Mojo

An author's rant

Reviewed in the United States on December 4, 2019

Verified Purchase

While there is some good information in this book, the author spends a great deal of time rehashing arguments he's had with other scholars about the topic. At times it's as if he wrote the book in an attempt to trump his opponents. This diminishes his credibility. A highly focused approach would have served him and his readers much better.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Laine Strain

Good at what it sets out to do, but it's far from the whole story

Reviewed in the United States on January 8, 2011

Verified Purchase

I found the arguments in this book about how language originate at all quite compelling. Most of the explanatory devices appealed to by other authors on the subject are, as the author states, things which would help select for language once it got going, but not things that would get it started. In the first section of the book he shows this, and re-examines many other flawed conceptions that previous researchers have used to find clues as to what got speech going (such as looking in our closest cousins who do not have language rather than looking at what set our ancestors apart from them). That said, the book is very much focused on what got something resembling language started in the first place, with only a few chapters dedicated to how this linguistic seed would have developed, and very little discussion into the particulars of how later iterations of what would become language would help people construct niches. (The book is firmly founded in niche construction theory, but provides background on such.) He ends on a really neat note comparing human and ant activities and discussing continuing evolution in the human species, but I really wish there had been one more chapter at the end.

5 people found this helpful

Helpful

Steve

Interesting development in language theory

Reviewed in the United States on April 26, 2009

Verified Purchase

My interest is philosophy, and philosophy is about what we can know about anything (condensed definition). So when I read the subtitle "How humans made language, How language made humans" my interest was peaked. Most how-did-language-begin books delve into genes (this one does a bit), how the human brain is so much bigger (so does this one), how our hands are different (yes, here too a bit), but most seem to take the approach that a being either has language or it doesn't. The fact that all the known languages (living and dead) are fully developed and capable of expressing everything needed - emotionally, spiritually, how to live, provide food and shelter, socially, etc. - for that society (sometimes lack of vocabulary in a society may make it difficult to express something about another society) and that there aren't any "primitive" languages (grunts and groans) would seem to back that thesis, but Adam's Tongue develops - quite powerfully for me - the thesis that language and humanity develop together, and indeed cannot develop apart. There's a "niche" into which humanity goes and in that niche both grow into what exists today - a species that is self-aware, able to reflect on the past and plan for the future, able to contemplate what may exist outside of its immediate area of existence because of language, and because of language that species is human. The end of the book is I think IMHO a little abrupt; a very interesting thought experiment projecting to the future is briefly introduced and then left hanging - a pity! I have taken that thought experiment myself to its conclusion but I would have appreciated Derek Bicketon's own conclusion.

38 people found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

A. Parker

Great book but...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 15, 2014

Verified Purchase

I love this book partly because of the way it's written. I expect this type of book to read a bit dry (I'm used to that in scientific books anyway so I don't mind) but I was surprised at the author's eloquence and ability to analyze a complex subject using simple words. The text simply flows, which makes it an easy and very pleasurable read, almost like a fiction book.
The arguments the author makes are very interesting too, he's not afraid to question other people theories and his analysis is thorough, and it seems like he might actually be the one who's right in the debate on the origins of language. I've read quite a bit regarding human prehistory and I know it's hard to find books whose authors try to be objective and try to really exhaust the subject, so I was happy to have found this amazing read.
BUT, as someone has mentioned in another review, I do feel like there's something missing at the end, as if the author wanted to write a Part 2 in which he'd sum up what he wrote in this one. This book ends too quickly, it should be much longer as a long summary is needed after such a detailed analysis of various issues. I felt a bit cheated, if I am to be honest, because after this very interesting ride I expected a great conclusion, some kind of bang. I thought I'd walk away transformed. Instead, the book lost impetus in the end and I walked away slightly dissatisfied.
Still, this is by far the most interesting book about language that I've ever read. It makes you think and it really transports you to those prehistoric times you're reading about. I like the author's approach and I think that all in all he's done a great job. I just hope that Part 2 is on the way.

Traveller

How language got started

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 23, 2011

Verified Purchase

I must first of all say that I found his style overly combatative, beyond the necessary in pointing out flaws in rival theories, at least in the beginning of the book. I found my back being put up and they weren't my theories! Not being familiar with all the approaches I felt I was at times being presented with caricatures with objectionable elements being exaggerated. That said, he makes substantive points, particularly as to necessary conditions that other approaches either ignore or have very unsatisfactory explanations for. And it is entertaining!

When the positive message starts around chapter 5 (with some groundwork earlier) I found it really exciting and hardly put the book down until the end! Whilst there is speculation which Bickerton acknowledges, and probably any theory in this area is bound to have some, he does provide a plausible and at times probable path towards complex language from non-combinatorial signals with the necessary aspects addressed.

Bickerton has two main points. Firstly, what the first steps towards language away from normal animal communication systems must logically have been.
Secondly, that there must have been some fairly unique evolutionary niche that proto-humans found themselves in, or created for themselves, that meant that some steps in language beyond here-and-now manipulation or warning were advantageous. Afer all, only one evolutionary line with language has survived to the present day. Apes, in particular, have done it once. Why not other times unless any were in direct competition with the homo sapiens line?

I am tempted to layout the whole theory and various asides but that is not my place and, if interested, you really should read this book!

4 people found this helpful

Bob Jones

Adam's Tongue

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 4, 2013

Verified Purchase

Somewhat harder going for the lay reader than the author's 'Bastard Tongues' this is still good stuff and deserves a wide audience. Anyone who can take on Naom Chomsky deserves a read.

Gregory Nixon

Original Thinking on Language for the Layman

Reviewed in Canada on March 31, 2011

Verified Purchase

Bickerton gets a little bit carried away with his discovery of "ecological niche theory", which, after all, is anything but new (though formerly called by slightly different names), and his sudden political correctness was annoying. In fact, I almost gave this book four stars because he insists, first, that protolanguage began when cooperation was needed to scavenge dead meat, a situation that could just as easily be applied to hunting, and, second, he suggests that women were likely equal participants on such dangerous scavenging forays based on nothing at all but today's "common sense". But this is still a top-notch, truly adventurous survey of the field in which Bickerton uses both erudition and wit to take on those who hold to the notion of most scientists and evolutionary psychologists that all that's human can be traced to deterministic biological or genetic sources. This includes Noam Chomsky with whom Bickerton had been formerly closely associated, at least in the minds of the academic public. And this is one of Bickerton's strongest suits: In the face of new evidence he has changed his mind about several of his cherished ideas - the most prominent being that an evolutionary mutation in the brain must have led to higher intelligence and hence to the development of language.

This time Bickerton takes his stand with the environmentally-specific necessity for cultural invention that, over many millennnia, led to changes, first, in brain function, and then in cerebral structure itself. He makes a strong case. In doing so, he produces a bracing read with ascerbic wit, self-mockery and genial arrogance. Not only does this make for zesty reading, but he reveals hard-earned insights in layman's terms. These days, symbolic cultural invention has been pushed aside in favour of the smooth evolutionary transitions evidenced in the breakthroughs of genetic science; instead, Bickerton shows that, fundamentally, humanity must have invented itself. Why? Out of sheer necessity - in this case the necessity of telling tribemates about a new source of dead meat far away that can only be scavenged by large, cooperative groups. The communicative signal must do more than cause a reaction in the here and now (as amongst most other animals). It must indicate a common need, a far-away place, and perhaps the kind of animal. Such indexical signalling he sees as the rudiment of the birth of symbolism, which he now accepts and is his second great shift. His acceptance of symbolism - required for basic displacement (signals referring to distant places or even times) as the source of protolanguage (rather than complex gestures) - came after many exchanges with Terrence Deacon, but symbolism is really only hinted at by displacement.

Real symbolic interaction can begin only when symbols refer recursively and reflexively to other symbols, so a whole new world of imaginative symbolic culture can be entered and humanity can henceforth begin its expansion across the globe as the most adaptable of species because of its complex culture. This would be the move into actual language with syntactical structures that Bickerton reasonably guesses took place within the last 100 to 200 thousand years. Protolanguage, however, may go back to the beginnings of H. erectus and, if so, continued with little change for a few million years. He prefers to focus on the advent of protolanguage, very important but still not the crux of the truly human. Very little time is spent on the miracle of the emergence of real language, which must have been the cultural invention par excellence, since it led to the human consciousness we now find ourselves within. Only with the appearance of syntactic structures and, more important, the need for semantics (meaning!) did the human imagination reach out into the unknown and create a truly human universe.

Amazon Kunde

Bangs on

Reviewed in Germany on September 29, 2019

Verified Purchase

The author seems more interested in proving how stupid other researchers are than putting his point over. Half way though I gave it up.

See all reviews