Language (Ebook)
The Cultural Tool
Buy from
A groundbreaking and controversial new theory about how we talk.
Like other tools, language was invented, can be reinvented or lost, and shows significant variation across cultures. It's as essential to survival as fire - and, like fire, is found in all human societies.
Language presents the bold and controversial idea that language is not an innate component of the brain, as has been famously argued by Chomsky and Pinker. Rather, it's a cultural tool which varies much more across different societies than the innateness view suggests.
Fusing adventure, anthropology, linguistics and psychology, and drawing on Everett's pioneering research with the Amazonian Pirahãs, Language argues that language is embedded within - and is inseparable from - its specific culture. This book is like a fire that will generate much light. And much heat.
Reviews for Language
Economist
Guardian
Sunday Times
Tom Wolfe
Patricia S. Churchland
Patricia S. Churchland
Michael Corballis
Robert Brandom
Michael Silverstein
Robert Greene
Times Higher Educational Supplement
Daniel Everett
Related books

How Language Began
Daniel Everett
A revolutionary account of the origins of language from one of the world's best known and most influential linguists

Don't Sleep, There are Snakes
Daniel Everett
'An astonishing book: a work of exploration, into the most distant place and language, but also a revelation of the way language is shaped by thou…