How Improvisation Created Language And Changed The World

Birds sing. Green monkeys have separate alarm calls for snakes and leopards. Some chimps and parrots can mimic human speech. Many animal species communicate in ways that are important to their survival. Why, then, are humans the only animals with advanced language skills? In their eminently readable new book The Language Game, Morten H. Christiansen and Nick Chater wrestle with that question.

Christiansen is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Psychology at Cornell University and a professor in cognitive science of language at Aahus University in Denmark. Chater is a professor of behavioral science at Warwick University. Together, they are engaging storytellers relating how philosophers, historians, naturalists, linguists, anthropologists, and even mathematicians and computer scientists have tried to disentangle the mysteries of language. In telling their tales, the authors plunge down a warren-full of rabbit holes. Do all modern people speak some evolved variation of a primal, “Adamist” (as in “Adam and Eve”) language? Looking for clues to answers, the authors turn to the book of Genesis, the work of St. Augustine, the ideas of the early twentieth-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the code written by Navajos working with the United States military in World War II. And that’s just for starters. What unique features of the human brain allow humans to learn language? Searching for an answer, the authors explore the ideas of Noam Chomsky, who considered the possibility that children are born with the blueprint of a “universal grammar” coded into their genes and brains. They also look at the African diaspora and suggest that a more interesting question than “How did the human brain become so well adapted to language?” might be “How did language become so well adapted to the human brain?”

This is because language, according to Christiansen and Chaten, is not so much an invention as an improvisation, a “community-wide game of charades, where each new game builds on those that have gone before.” It is constantly re-contrived generation after generation. Children acquire words and phrases not by assimilating rules or by vocalizing according to patterns they were somehow born to express but by jumping into the game and extemporizing freely.

“We talk without knowing the rules of our language just as we play tennis without knowing the laws of physics, or sing without knowing music theory. In this very real sense, we speak, and do so skillfully and effectively, without knowing our language at all.”

According to The Language Game, individual people and entire cultures chaotically recombine the building blocks (or “prefabs”) of communication as novel situations demand new words and phrases. When speaking, a person’s primary concern is not to be correct but to be understood. Necessity is the mother of invention.

The theoretical approach that Christiansen and Chaten suggest about the acquisition and evolution of language closely mirrors ideas that Charles Darwin formulated about the evolution of biology. Darwin suggested that biological variations arise by accident and become stable attributes only if they are useful. Ditto, Christiansen and Chater might say, for language—though “by accident” may not be the best term to describe what underlies change. “Via ad-libbing” probably does the job better.

“Words do not have stable meanings,” the authors advise us.” “[T]hey are tools used in the moment.”

The Language Game is itself a beautiful bunch of words and phrases, though by “beautiful” I do not mean that its prose is highly styled. Christiansen and Chater use words for the same purpose they believe anyone does: to be understood. With a full-length book, though, their words have a second obligation, which is to keep readers fully engaged and curious until the end. This they do page by page and chapter by chapter with absorbing tales summarized (essentially) in the book’s subtitle: How Improvisation Created Language and Changed the World.

As a measure of what good storytellers the authors of The Language Game are: My advice is not to check the Notes section when only you need more information. Sure, use the Notes as references. However, after you’ve finished with the main body of the book, grab a cup of tea and read all of the Notes. You’ll encounter stories galore. Did you know that white colonists hunted and shot the indigenous people of Tierra Del Fuego who, in 1769, had peacefully welcomed Captain Cook and the crew of the HMS Endeavor and, in 1832, welcomed Charles Darwin and the crew of the HMS Beagle? Did you know that, for some species of songbirds, the female sings, too? Did you know that, despite several hundred years of concerted research and speculation, scientists still do not know when humans started talking? Did you know that the visual words of sign language are more quickly forgotten than the auditory words of speech?

Get that tea. Make it strong.

The Language Game: How Improvisation Created Language and Changed the World

By Morten H. Christiansen and Nick Chater

Basic Books

Pub Date: 2/22/22

305 pages