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Mini-Lecture
© Robert J. Brym (2004)
#2
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 prewired 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.
If you haven’t done so already, please pause for a moment and download the Figure that
accompanies this mini-lecture. It illustrates the Sapir-Worf thesis. The Sapir-Whorf thesis holds
that we experience certain things in our environment and form concepts about those things (path
12 in the Figure). We then develop language to express our concepts (path 23). Finally,
language itself influences how we see the world (path 31).
Whorf saw speech patterns as “interpretations of experience” (path 123). 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 (path 23).
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 path 31. 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
straightjacket. 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.