IN THE early afternoon of 16 January 1769, . When Captain James Cook and his crew came ashore, they were met by a group of Indigenous people, probably Haush hunter-gatherers. Two of Cook’s party advanced. Soon, two of the Haush also stepped forward, displayed small sticks and threw them aside. Cook’s men interpreted this as an indication of peaceful intentions. They were right: the groups were soon exchanging gifts and sharing food. With no common language and inhabiting utterly different worlds, they could nonetheless communicate through a high-stakes game of cross-cultural charades.
Most of us have faced our own communication challenges, perhaps resorting to pointing and gesturing when abroad. And yet in daily life, we rarely give language a second thought – never mind its many perplexing mysteries. How can noises convey meaning? Where do the complex layers of linguistic patterns come from? How come children learn language so easily, whereas chimpanzees can scarcely learn it at all?
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We believe these questions have remained unanswered because scientists have been looking at language all wrong. A growing body of research undermines prevailing ideas that humans possess an innate language ability somehow wired into our brains, encoding grammatical rules. In our new book, , we argue that language isn’t about rules at all. As Cook’s encounter illustrates, it is about improvisation, freedom and the desire to be understood, constrained only by our imaginations. This radical idea helps to explain those long-standing mysteries about language – as well as how language evolved and why it makes humans special.
For generations, scientists have sought to understand how the rules of language derive from biology. The founding figure in modern linguistics, Noam Chomsky, has long argued that , with specific grammars of individual languages as variations on this universal blueprint. More recently, psychologist Steven Pinker at Harvard University proposed that humans have an evolved , created by natural selection.
Origin myths
Even as young researchers, we saw several reasons to doubt the belief that language has its primary origin in biology. For a start, languages change much faster than our brains can evolve. , Hindi, Polish, and Waziri to evolve from a common proto-Indo-European origin, for example, whereas human evolution is on the timescale of . Besides, evolution has no foresight, so couldn’t have adapted our early ancestors in Africa to deal with the subsequent spectacular diversity of the world’s languages. Rather, biological evolution adapts organisms to their local environment, , which revealed that the birds had evolved into different species with beak variations each exquisitely adapted to crack nuts, eat cactus fruits or catch insects. If language evolved through biological adaptation, we would . But this isn’t the case: distantly related populations show no signs of having brains adapted to their particular language. After all, across the world, immigrant children easily learn the language of their new home.
If language doesn’t come from biology, then, where does it come from? We believe the answer is culture: language evolution is cultural evolution. And that, we argue, requires a rethink of how language works, too. It isn’t a game of tennis in which messages are lobbed back and forth between minds, which systematically extract the information. As Cook’s meeting with the Haush reveals, people collaborate to build a shared understanding incrementally, improvisation by improvisation, just as in a game of charades. If we are correct, the world’s are the result of countless repetitions of such charade-like games.
Of course, biology still plays a role. There is no doubt, for example, that particular regions of the human brain are especially involved in language, and that the nature of our vocal tract is crucial for allowing us to articulate words. But our species didn’t evolve a specific instinct just for language. Instead, our ability to play linguistic charades piggybacks on various skills that predate the emergence of language. In this respect, language resembles reading. Until about a century ago, few people could read and write, so literacy can’t be a biological adaptation. Instead, it is a product of cultural evolution, argues Stanislas Dehaene at the Collège de France in Paris. And writing is shaped by pre-existing cognitive abilities, including an ancient primate visual system, which helps to explain the puzzling discovery that . Likewise, the human brain has shaped language. Indeed, we find it useful to think of language as a – an organism adapted to a specific niche: the human brain.
But how could repeated improvised games of linguistic charades generate the grammatical complexity of language? Linguists looking at how languages change over time have uncovered a compelling alternative to Chomsky’s universal grammar that provides the answer. Today’s grammatical patterns arose through a gradual process known as , in which words become bleached of meaning and take on purely grammatical roles, while their sounds are often eroded to be easier to say. Consider negation in French. First, the Latin non dico (I do not say) becomes je ne dis – with non eroded to ne. Then words such as pas (step) are added, as in je ne marche pas (I won’t walk a step). Over time, ne … pas becomes bleached of any meaning about steps, so that a noun for a concrete observable action now has an abstract grammatical role. With grammaticalisation, the patterns of grammar needn’t be built into our genes. Instead, they emerge spontaneously over centuries and millennia.
Then there is the question of how you understand a continuous flow of speech sounds – an astonishing mental feat, as becomes obvious when you hear the machine-gun exchanges of people chatting in a language you don’t know. , sequential approach: first assessing what speech sounds we are hearing, then syllables, then words, then gradually building up the grammar and meaning and, finally, figuring out what the speaker is really getting at. But that would be far too slow. Speech sounds short-term memory for spoken words is . Yet a typical English speaker will produce between around
“If language doesn’t come from biology, where does it come from?”
The brain faces what we have dubbed the now-or-never bottleneck: as the flow of language hits you, you must make sense of it right away. Instead of systematically analysing it, we argue, the brain uses , words into phrases, and phrases into sentences before it is obliterated from memory by the onrushing torrent of new speech. Even then, you cannot hope to get much out of this onslaught of language if you rely on the linguistic input alone. Words, phrases and sentences don’t carry neatly defined packets of meaning that can be snapped together like Lego bricks. For example, a “door” you walk through isn’t interpreted in the same way as a “door” you open. And the meaning ascribed to “light” depends on whether it is being used to describe tanks, wine, colours, infantry or music, say. As in charades, words provide . And, as psycholinguist Herbert Clark at Stanford University in California has argued, . It isn’t enough merely to analyse speech sounds. Crucially, humans must also interpret them in real time using creativity and whatever shared intuitions, knowledge and memories of past exchanges we can collaboratively muster.
If languages are honed by cultural evolution, through generations of improvised charade playing, that also . Language is a communicative tool shaped by the limitations and capabilities of the human brain. Just as physical tools, like scissors, have been shaped by cultural evolution to be , so too has language. The challenge for each child isn’t to master a complex grammatical system, but to use whatever clues they can gather from the immediate situation and past experiences to make themselves understood and understand others in the here and now. And the key to their success is simple: every speaker was once a child too. So the patterns of linguistic charades that children must learn were created by previous generations of language users with similar brains and bodies. This is what makes language easy to learn and use.
To see why, consider this. A scientist collects a sequence of data points – 1, 2, 4, 8 – and wonders what will come next. In the natural world, there are many possibilities: the sequence might repeat, start descending, get “stuck” at 8 or take any number of directions. Alternatively, two people see the same sequence of numbers and must guess what the other will choose as the continuation. In this case, both are most likely to say 16, 32, 64, not because this is the only possible answer, but because it is . Similarly, because language is culturally evolved from the interactions of generations of people, the most obvious answer is typically the right one. As a result, . Of course, as with charades, each separate linguistic community will create its own distinctive paths. That would explain the .
It may seem that our linguistic charades perspective implies . No doubt, gestures can easily mimic different aspects of the world. But sounds have remarkable capacities for mimicry too. Recent research by Marcus Perlman at the University of Birmingham, UK, and his colleagues shows that people can easily come up with non-speech sounds that can mimic all sorts of different concepts – a swoosh sound to denote a knife and quick, repeated swooshes to indicate cutting, for example – and that these novel vocalisations are understood across cultures.
A virtuous cycle
The debate continues over whether language originated in gestures or sounds. Our take is that its beginnings were probably multimodal, because early communicators would have wanted to incorporate as many ways as possible to provide clues for linguistic charades. A virtuous cycle may then have followed: the ability to use an ever-growing set of clues would have increased social complexity, favouring people with bigger brains, which in turn would enable even more advanced charades playing, selecting for the evolution of still bigger brains, and so on. How humans got into this cycle isn’t known. It is even possible that language was a side effect of having evolved bigger brains for another reason. What seems clear, however, is that our nearest primate cousins, the great apes, didn’t join us. They aren’t able to play charades because they lack many of the underlying skills on which it piggybacks. This helps explain why language is unique to humans.
The emergence of language has been described as one of seven major transitions in evolution. It changes everything. It allows humans to pass on knowledge and skills to future generations, rather than being condemned to relearn them afresh in each generation. It allows us to create the complex webs of agreements that underpin our social interactions and groups, as well as creating moral and religious norms to help us coordinate our actions with others. Without language, there could be no legal system, no organised trade or finance, no politics and no cumulative science or technology.
Language is our greatest invention. Without it, our other spectacular achievements would be inconceivable. Yet, if we are correct, all people ever do is play linguistic charades to get their messages across. Each charade can shape the next in remarkable and unexpected ways, but there has never been any plan to create a system for communication to revolutionise human life. Language is the cumulative, but accidental, result of the communicative efforts of countless past generations. The story of language is therefore the story of humanity.
How to be a better communicator
If language is like a game of charades (see main story), then that has real-life implications. Words, phrases and sentences are only the tip of the communication iceberg. They give clues to meaning, but below the surface lies a whole range of other things that are necessary for us to interpret what is said. These include factual knowledge, cultural and social information – such as customs, norms, conventions, values and unspoken rules – and interpersonal skills.
We can become better communicators by focusing on these submerged attributes. That entails paying close attention to what we have in common with conversational partners and where we might differ, which requires empathy and collaboration. Fortunately, this is something we can learn to do better. In New York, at Stony Brook University’s , they use improvisation exercises – such as mirroring the body movements of a partner – designed to get actors to tune into each other’s perspective, to help people improve their science communication. The method has been very successful and widely adopted.
What works for scientists also works for everyone else. Whether you are outlining a business plan, telling a story or just giving directions, think carefully about where your audience is coming from and what they might need from you – not just what you want to say.
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