The Language Instinct

The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language is a 1994 book by Steven Pinker, written for a general audience. Its central claim is that human beings are born with an innate capacity for language. Pinker does not treat language as a cultural invention on a par with metalworking or writing, but as a biological faculty that evolution has shaped to solve the problem of communication among social hunter-gatherers. He compares it to other natural "instincts", such as the web-weaving of spiders or the dam-building of beavers.

The book is organized as a sustained argument that dismantles widespread beliefs about language. Pinker questions the idea that children must be taught to speak, that most people's grammar is poor, that the quality of language is steadily declining, that the structure of a language decisively shapes the thoughts of its speakers (the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis), and that nonhuman animals have learned language in any comparable sense. To support the universality of the language faculty, he draws on Derek Bickerton's work on creoles: children spontaneously create a coherent grammar even when they grow up surrounded by a pidgin without consistent rules. Likewise, deaf babies "babble" with their hands and invent sign languages with genuine grammar, and speech develops without formal instruction or systematic correction by parents.

Pinker also distinguishes language from general intelligence, describing it as a specialized "mental module". He separates the grammar studied by linguists, which is descriptive, from the prescriptive rules of style guides, which he regards as largely irrelevant to real communication. To outline this instinct, he combines his own research on child language acquisition with neurological evidence, such as Broca's and Wernicke's aphasias, the existence of a critical period in childhood, and many examples from popular culture. Much of the book revolves around the universal grammar proposed by Noam Chomsky, which Pinker endorses sympathetically, though he disagrees with Chomsky's skepticism that evolutionary theory can account for the language instinct.

The book was widely read and discussed, though not uncritically. The English linguist Geoffrey Sampson challenged the notion of an innate language instinct, and other writers questioned the strength of some of its claims. Richard Webster, in Why Freud Was Wrong (1995), found Pinker's case for a genetic basis of language and his critique of the "standard social science model" persuasive, but judged other speculations, such as specialized neural networks for "intuitive mechanics" and "intuitive biology", to be questionable, fearing they might be taken as established science and encourage extreme genetic determinism. Despite such objections, the book became one of the most successful popular works on language of its time.