# Is language a product of culture?



## Residente Calle 13

The answer seems obvious. Dutch children learn Dutch so it must be a cultural product. However, that just means Dutch is a product of culture. What about language itself? Do we learn how to speak from our parents? Do people always end up talking just like their parents?

This chapter poses some interesting question. I would like those who have the time to read it and think about it to comment.


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## Cereth

Noahm Chomsky´s theory its very interesting, but if you are interested in this subject why don´t you read Vygotsky´s theory it really , really makes you think. The russians have studied this fact for so long and they are such masters in the language issue.

if you have doubts we can talk about that later, i love Vygotsky´s theory.


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## Residente Calle 13

Will do. Thanks for the suggestion.


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## maxiogee

Surely it is a case of the chicken and the egg?
One cannot have a culture without a language ('language' in the broadest sense) and one cannot have a language without a culture.
These two things both derive from a common and shared experience and the requirement/ability to communicate about that.

As for the question of "do people always end up talking just like their parents?" - No.
Just look at the children of non-native speaking immigrants in any culture. They acquire the local accent and the local idioms. They will speak their parents' language but they often lose the skill to use it well. 
Researchers will tell you that children who only associate with their parents do not develop the same language skills as those who have a wide circle of contacts. The isolated ones do not develop as broad a vocabulary as their parents.


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## Outsider

The author's central thesis seems to be summarized in the following:



> Language is not a cultural artifact that we learn the way we learn to tell time or how the federal government works. Instead, it is a distinct piece of the biological makeup of our brains. Language is a complex, specialized skill, which develops in the child spontaneously, without conscious effort or formal instruction, is deployed without awareness of its underlying logic, is qualitatively the same in every individual, and is distinct from more general abilities to process information or behave intelligently.


But aren't there examples of people who never learnt to speak because they were abandoned as children, and lived alone away from other humans?

And an objection: if language were just a biological instinct, and not a cultural artifact, then we would all speak the same language. His theory does not account for languistic variety and relations between languages.


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## Residente Calle 13

maxiogee said:
			
		

> Surely it is a case of the chicken and the egg?
> One cannot have a culture without a language ('language' in the broadest sense) and one cannot have a language without a culture.


I _think _the answer to both of these riddles is evolution. Pinker seems to think so as well. In other words, chickens, eggs, language, and culture are all products of natural selection.

But I think the question is interesting because it puts the commonly held belief that children "learn grammar" into question.

Here's another excerpt you might find interesting.


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## Residente Calle 13

Outsider said:
			
		

> The author's central thesis seems to be summarized in the following:
> 
> But aren't there examples of people who never learnt to speak because they were abandoned as children, and lived alone away from other humans?



Some of those feral children can be taught some language to some degree.

Some wild animals who grow up in a zoo are also incapable of surviving in the wild. We wouldn't argue that wild animals don't have a survival instinct just because the ones who have been taken out of the "natural" environment fail to survive. In the human case, the natural environment is a languaged community.



			
				Outsider said:
			
		

> And an objection: if language were just a biological instinct, and not a cultural artifact, then we would all speak the same language. His theory does not account for languistic variety and relations between languages.


_*Language *_is the instinct not _*l**anguages*_. This excerpt doesn't explain that and in fact, I don't think any part of this book addresses linguistic diversity. There are some interesting articles and books I know about that subject if you are interested.


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## Outsider

Residente Calle 13 said:
			
		

> Yes but some wild animals who grow up in a zoo are also incapable of surviving in the wild. We wouldn't argue that wild animals don't have a survival instinct just because the ones who have been taken out of the "natural" environment fail to survive.


Or maybe surviving in the wild isn't just about instincts. Maybe those animals need learned skills to survive, as well.



			
				Residente Calle 13 said:
			
		

> _*Language *_is the instinct not _*l**anguages*_. This excerpt doesn't explain that and in fact, I don't think any part of this book addresses linguistic diversity. There are some interesting articles and books I know about that subject if you are interested.


I'm arguing that language can't be _just_ an instinct. There must be a social component to it, hence the existence of different languages, different dialects, etc.


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## Residente Calle 13

I agree with what you wrote. 

Let me try to put this another way.

_*Talking a specific language *_is not _*just *_an instinct but _*language*_, says Pinker, is.

In other words, I could have this conversation with you over the phone because we've both _*learned *_English. But we both began babbling as children and reacted to the words around us when we were very young because we couldn't help it. English is culture. Language is not.

It's like the difference between riding a bike, riding a horse, driving a car, and getting around. All except the last one have to be specifically taught. I don't think babies are born with the urge to drive a car. They *are *born with, as anybody who has children knows, with the instinct to move from one place to another which develops over time.


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## Outsider

I don't disagree that the ability and the drive to learn to speak are probably instinctive. I just think that, as in the example of driving a car, if your environment does not give you the means to apply your instinct, you may never develop it. In the case of language, this means you need to have other people around you to talk to. That seems to inevitably make the _use_ of the language instinct a sociobiological, _perhaps_ cultural, matter. 

This discussion reminded me of a text I read a while ago. I thought it had some interesting ideas, as well as some intriguing examples of sign language acquisition by deaf children. The author mentions Prof. Pinker and the language instinct.


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## Residente Calle 13

Outsider said:
			
		

> In the case of language, this means you need to have other people around you to talk to. That seems to inevitably make the _use_ of the language instinct a sociobiological, _perhaps_ cultural, matter.


*FULFILLING* My instinct to reproduce depends on having people around me.

A great deal of our instincts are related to how we act in conjunction with other members of our species. Copulating is interacting. I would say that language is like the instinct to have sex and reproduce. I has to do with our instinct to do it with other people.


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## maxiogee

Residente Calle 13 said:
			
		

> My instinct to reproduce depends on having people around me.



I'm not sure I agree with you there.
I think you'll find that people in unisexual environments still get the urge/desire/impulse to have children.
Were this not so then celibacy for monks would not be such a 'sacrifice' for them.


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## Outsider

Like Maxiogee, I'm not sure the reproductive instinct is 100% directed at other people, but that's a topic for a different discussion. 

Anyway, I see an important difference between the two situations. The reproductive act, in its barest form (say, artificial insemination) is purely biological. Sure, it takes two people to accomplish it, but society has nothing to add to the act itself. Whereas it seems to me that language, particular natural languages, are always constructed _in society_, and shaped by the linguistic history of _a_ society.


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## Residente Calle 13

maxiogee said:
			
		

> I'm not sure I agree with you there.
> I think you'll find that people in unisexual environments still get the urge/desire/impulse to have children.
> Were this not so then celibacy for monks would not be such a 'sacrifice' for them.



I misspoke. Let me rephrase that. Fulfulling my urge to reproduce depends on at least having another person around me.


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## Residente Calle 13

There _*is*_ a parallel.

We have an instinct to reproduce but can't do it alone. We have an instinct to talk but can't do it alone.


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## Outsider

But there are also differences.

The result of a reproductive act depends _only_ on the genes of the couple. The genetics of a child are completely determined by the genetic make-up of the two parents.

The result of an attempt to speak, or to learn to speak, depends on various inputs by a large number of people around the speaker. The language learned by a child not only has contributions from the people with whom the child directly interacts, but also from a linguistic history common to a wider community of speakers which the child may never meet, including dead speakers who, by using earlier versions of the language, have shaped it into to what it is in the present.


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## Residente Calle 13

Outsider said:
			
		

> The language learned by a child not only has contributions from the people with whom the child directly interacts, but also from a linguistic history common to a wider community of speakers which the child may never meet, including dead speakers who, by using earlier versions of the language, have shaped it into to what it is in the present.


I agree but there you are talking about _*a specific language*_ not language itself. The language I speak at home has a great deal to do with the Roman Empire but the fact that I use language has to do the fact that I'm human. If not Spanish then another language. You see the difference, right?


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## Outsider

Residente Calle 13 said:
			
		

> Is language a product of culture?
> 
> The answer seems obvious. *Dutch children learn Dutch* so it must be a cultural product. However, that just means Dutch is a product of culture. What about language itself? *Do we learn how to speak from our parents? Do people always end up talking just like their parents?*
> 
> This chapter poses some interesting question. I would like those who have the time to read it and think about it to comment.


The second sentence I bolded in your original post above can mean either of two things:

1) Do we learn to speak our first language from our parents (and, presumably, other people around us)?
2) Is the ability to speak itself learnt from people around us?

My understanding was that you and Prof. Pinker wanted to use the answer to 2) in order to draw conclusions about 1). I have a hard time seeing how one can study issue 2) separately from issue 1). But then, I haven't read his book.


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## Residente Calle 13

Outsider said:
			
		

> The second sentence I bolded in your original post above can mean either of two things:
> 
> 1) Do we learn to speak our first language from our parents (and, presumably, other people around us)?
> 2) Is the ability to speak itself learnt from people around us?
> 
> My understanding was that you and Prof. Pinker wanted to use the answer to 2) in order to draw conclusions about 1). I have a hard time seeing how one can study issue 2) separately from issue 1). But then, I haven't read his book.



I don't know what Prof. Pinker wants but I just want to hear what people think about the idea that we talk because our brains are wired to do so and not because our parents "teach us" how to talk in the way they "teach us" how to drive a car, for example.

I don't have any conclusions. I would like to hear what yours are. I think I you and I agree on the basic premise of this and that we disagree on very little if you look at the big picture.


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## Outsider

Residente Calle 13 said:
			
		

> I just want to hear what people think about the idea that we talk because our brains are wired to do so and not because our parents "teach us" how to talk in the way they "teach us" how to drive a car, for example.


O.K., I think it's both.


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## Residente Calle 13

Outsider said:
			
		

> O.K., I think it's both.


That's totally cool. But I have three questions for you, then. 

The article that you posted a link to made fleeting mention of some kids in Nicaragua who were all put together in a school in order to have them learn how to lip read.

Since that experiment failed miserably, these kids made a up a relatively clumsy system of signs to communicate (a pidgin). Their children learned took that language from their parents but made big changes to it and modified it to such an extent that it's now called Nicaraguan Sign Language (a language). It's much more complex and nuanced than the first version. The second generation can tell pidgin from the language as easily as you can tell "Me Tarzan, you Jane." is not Standard English.

Question 1) Who taught Generation 1 the first language?
Question 2) Who taught Generartion 2 how to "improve" a language?
Question 3) Where did the grammar come from in *both *cases?


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## Residente Calle 13

For those interested, here is a short history of Nicaraguan Sign Langauge.


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## Outsider

Residente Calle 13 said:
			
		

> Question 1) Who taught Generation 1 the first language?


They taught it to each other.



			
				Residente Calle 13 said:
			
		

> Question 2) Who taught Generartion 2 how to "improve" a language?


That might be the innate ability you like to call language instinct, combined with teaching each other again, and perhaps with a deliberate attempt to imitate what they saw people who were not deaf do.



			
				Residente Calle 13 said:
			
		

> Question 3) Where did the grammar come from in *both *cases?


Ouch! What is grammar?  
Are we talking about Chomsky's ideas of universal grammar, and such? I don't know anything about that...


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## Residente Calle 13

Outsider said:
			
		

> They taught it to each other.


Yeah! I think that's right. So what we have here is a case of people who did not "have" a language and made one up.

The reported cases of _languageless _people are very rare. People tend to be around other people. Almost always. In fact, reported cases of children, in ALL of history, who grew up alone are about...100! That's it! Kids who are by themselves in the woods are generally lunch. Most of the cases of kids who grew up in isolation are, sadly, kids who were locked in a closet somewhere. And that means _*those *_kids are even more screwed up.

What's NEVER been reported is some kid who grew up the forest by him/herself and made up his/her own language. In any case, why would he/she need a language to talk to him/herself?

So you need _more than one person_ for a language but those people don't have to be the previous generation. Those kids did not learn how to talk from the previous generation. So they must have been born with something that allowed them to get together with other people and make up a system of communication. And they were able to pass that down to another generation who did not end up speaking like the people they "got" the language from.

In other words, for kids who speak NSL, _*that *_language is a cultural artifact with a history and a legacy. But the language instinct was something they were born with.


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