Language: The Cultural Tool
The case that language is not an innate instinct but a tool human beings invented — shaped by culture, by history, and by the everyday need to be understood.
About the book
This book was written to show how language emerges from culture, and not from a biological universal grammar. The intended audience is the general reader interested in the nature of language and the role that culture, rather than biology alone, plays in shaping it.
Praise
“Revelatory. There is nothing about humans that is quite as astonishing as language.”
“A book whose importance is almost impossible to overstate. This is an intellectual cri de coeur and a profound celebration of human diversity … A very rich but also very readable book.”
The Sunday Times
“Controversial, driven by data from across the sciences, and leavened with wit — Language: The Cultural Tool is the book on language I have been waiting and waiting for. A masterpiece, and then some.”
Patricia S. Churchland
Editions & translations
English — UK edition
Profile Books · English
Links & downloads
About Daniel Everett
I came to linguistics serendipitously. Growing up in Holtville, California, near the Mexican border, I heard Spanish all around me, though I expected to become a musician rather than a scientist. On a school-band trip to Hollywood, I saw My Fair Lady and became fascinated by Henry Higgins. The film’s linguistic consultant, Peter Ladefoged, later became my friend and co-author.
A few years later, I moved to Brazil with SIL International, with which I am no longer affiliated, and earned my doctorate in linguistics at the University of Campinas. Beginning in 1977, I spent many years living and conducting field research among Indigenous communities in the Brazilian Amazon.
Linguist, anthropologist and author. Trustee Professor of Cognitive Sciences, Bentley University.