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Book review - The Language Myth

Article  in  Babel · August 2015

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 Reviews
Reviews
THE LANGUAGE MYTH:
WHY LANGUAGE IS NOT
AN INSTINCT
Vyvyan Evans
Cambridge University Press,
2014, 314 pages, RRP £17.99.
T
Javier Alcalde
o what extent is
language innate?
Is it autonomous
from other
aspects of
our mind? Is
it really the cultural tool that
sets humans apart from other
species? To what extent does our
native tongue affect the way we
perceive the world? The Language
Myth attempts to answer such
questions in a way that is both
informative for linguists and
accessible for lay readers. It
presents an encyclopaedic range
of empirical evidence from a
variety of disciplines including
psycholinguistics, anthropology,
evolutionary theory and
cognitive science. This evidence
consistently refutes the language-
50 Babel The Language Magazine | August 2015
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as-instinct thesis defended by
scholars such as Noam Chomsky
and Steven Pinker. By doing so, it
affirms that a linguistics based on
repeated ‘myths’ or assumptions
- like the notion of language as
an instinct and the existence of a
universal grammar – is misguided,
even if it has influenced
researchers, students and the
general public for decades.
Evans uses recent evidence on
linguistic diversity to argue that
there is no universal grammar
shared by all languages. For
example, if one third of the 350
language families in the world
are isolates (natural languages
with no clear relation to other
languages), then current
languages could hardly be
derived from a single language.
In fact, rather than being innate,
a grammar seems to emerge
from use. Moreover the idea that
human language is unrelated
to animal communication
systems also seems to be wrong.
Evans shows the astonishing
similarities between the
communicative systems of
different species, including apes,
whales, frogs, bees and even
human sign languages. The
communicative abilities of non-
human species would indeed
be continuous with human
language. On another front,
Benjamin Lee Whorf’s intuition
about language relativity – the
so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
that thought is dependent from
language - helps to explain
striking findings. For instance,
the fact that Greek-speakers’
brains respond differently from
those of English speakers to the
blue colour range. Evans argues
that the different languages we
use result in different minds.
Whether or not language is
an instinct has been one of the
central debates in linguistics
since its inception. Vyvyan
Evans provides a step-by-step
compilation of research which
rigorously and systematically
criticises the notion and, at the
same time, serves to argue his
own language-as-use thesis. It
is fair to say that the critical side
of the book is more solidly built
than Evans’s theory. In part,
this is because the hypotheses
from cognitive linguistics –
concerning for instance the
notion of cultural intelligence
– have been developed more
recently, and some have not yet
been properly tested.
The Language Myth is an
ambitious, entertaining and
compellingly written book and a
must for anyone who is interested
in knowing how language and the
mind really work. ¶
Javier Alcalde is a researcher at the
International Catalan Institute for Peace
in Barcelona, Spain. He holds a PhD
in Political Science from the European
University Institute in Florence.