Christine Kenneally
The First Word
The search for the origins of language
Viking 2007

kenneally192 human mutations

200 … the studies presented here signal a profound change of mood in the scientific community. In most disciplines the focus used to be on the separateness of animals and humans, that gulf being marked most strikingly by language. But over the last few decades, the emphasis has switched to investigating the continuity of life in addition to clarifying the boundaries that lie between species. We no longer have a sense that we are standing apart from all animal life and that language is a discreet, singular ability that isolates us.

Despite the initial controversy connected with examining the mental life of nonhuman animals, once this research began it didn't take scholars long to discover that thinking is a widely spread characteristic of many forms of life. In addition, in many animals there is some lexical ability, a capacity of a simple, meaningful structure, elements of culture, and the ability to imitate and learn. In animals closely related to us, the rudimentary beginnings of vocal control are evident. Although language evolution is a relatively new field, it has brought together this research from many disciplines in a completely new way.

Language revolutionaries search has illuminated a complicated geometry of species, traits, and relationships, and then the face of this newly defined space words like „uniqueness“, „innateness“, and „instinct“ have come to mean everything and nothing. Those terms are still bandied about to explain the disagreements between people working on language evolution, but in fact everyone agrees that there is linguistic innateness, and everyone agrees there is something unique about language.

Language has to be partly innate, simply because human babies are born with the ability to learn the language of their parents. While this can justifiably be called the language instinct, there is no one gene compelling us to produce language. Instead, a set of genetic settings gives rise to a set of behaviours and perceptual and cognitive biases, some of which may be more general and others of which are more language specific.

Language is unique in that there are no other animals with which we converse, no matter what language we are speaking. And yes the miracle of this research has been the realisation that what is unique from one perspective may be constructed of mostly old parts from another.

All the work in genetics, neuroscience, ethology, biology, and linguistics has emphasised both the undeniable separateness and the powerful continuity of language. We are not the only animals that live within a world of meaning. And yet no other animal mimics in quite the way we do, no other animal is able to produce such an ordered flurry of distinct and meaningful bites of sound, and suddenly no other animal puts all this together and communicates it in the same way we do.

Kenneally