Christopher: Alright Lucas, five-word review of Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct. Lucas: Language isn't what you think. Christopher: Ooh, cryptic. My five: "Your toddler is a genius." Lucas: Okay, I'm intrigued. You're saying my nephew who eats crayons is secretly Noam Chomsky? Christopher: In a way, yes! That’s the core of what we're exploring today in Steven Pinker's classic, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. And Pinker wasn't just some armchair philosopher; he's a renowned cognitive psychologist. This book, from 1994, was his big move to take these revolutionary, and frankly controversial, ideas from linguistics and evolutionary psychology to a massive audience. It was a huge bestseller and really shaped public conversation. Lucas: Controversial is right. I know this book stirred up a huge debate that's still going on. Some critics say he dismisses competing theories too easily. So where do we even start with an idea this big? The idea that language is an instinct, not something we just learn like riding a bike, feels massive. Christopher: The best place to start is with the most powerful proof. It's a story that feels less like science and more like a modern miracle. It's the story of how, in the 1980s, a group of children literally invented a new language out of thin air.

Lucas: Whoa, hold on. Invented a language? You mean like, from scratch? That sounds like something from a fantasy novel. Christopher: It does, but it's a documented fact. It happened in Nicaragua. Before 1979, deaf people in the country were completely isolated from one another. They lived in scattered villages and had no shared sign language. Most just used simple, homemade gestures with their families. Lucas: Okay, so they had basic communication, but not a real language with grammar and all that. Christopher: Exactly. Then, the Sandinista government came to power and, as part of their educational reforms, they opened the country's first schools for the deaf. For the first time, hundreds of deaf children were brought together. And what do you think happened? Lucas: I assume the teachers tried to teach them an existing sign language, or maybe Spanish lip-reading? Christopher: They tried, but it largely failed. The real story happened on the playgrounds and in the school buses. The kids started pooling their homemade gestures together. The older students created a kind of pidgin sign system. Linguists who studied it said it was very basic, like a string of nouns and verbs. You could get a point across, but it was slow and clunky. It lacked consistent grammatical rules. Lucas: That makes sense. A sort of makeshift communication system. But that's not a full language. Christopher: Here's where the miracle happens. A few years later, a new wave of younger children entered the school. These little kids, maybe four or five years old, were exposed to the older kids' clunky pidgin. But they didn't just copy it. Their brains, hard-wired with this language instinct, took that broken input and supercharged it. Lucas: Wait, the younger kids made it more complex? Without being taught? That feels completely backwards. Christopher: It's the absolute core of Pinker's argument. The younger children spontaneously started adding grammatical complexity that didn't exist before. They standardized word order. They developed ways to mark who did what to whom. They created signs for abstract concepts. Their signing became faster, more fluid, and infinitely more expressive. They had created a full-fledged creole language, now known as Nicaraguan Sign Language, or ISN. Lucas: That is genuinely mind-blowing. So the children's brains filled in the grammatical gaps automatically? They didn't just learn a language; their minds generated one. Christopher: Precisely. Pinker calls this process "creolization," and he argues it's the smoking gun for the language instinct. It shows that children don't just passively absorb language; they have an innate "language acquisition device," a kind of mental software that expects to find grammar in the world, and if it doesn't find it, it will create it. Lucas: So does this mean any group of kids left on an island would just... invent a language? Christopher: The evidence points to yes. Pinker provides other examples, like the story of Hawaiian Creole. In the late 1800s, sugar plantations in Hawaii brought in immigrant workers from China, Japan, Portugal, the Philippines—all speaking different languages. To communicate, the adults developed a pidgin. It was a choppy, grammarless mashup. Lucas: A necessary tool for basic communication, I get it. Christopher: But their children, who grew up hearing this pidgin as their main input, did the exact same thing as the Nicaraguan kids. They transformed it into Hawaiian Creole, a rich, stable, and grammatically complex language that is still spoken today. The children didn't learn the pidgin; they used it as raw material to build a real language. Lucas: It's like their brains were running a program that said, "Error: Incomplete grammatical structure found. Now generating a complete system." Christopher: That's a perfect analogy. And it's not just groups. Pinker tells the story of a deaf boy named Simon, whose deaf parents had learned sign language late in life and were not very fluent. Their signing was inconsistent and often ungrammatical. Lucas: So Simon's only input was a broken version of the language. Christopher: Yes. And when researchers tested him, they found that Simon's own sign language was far more complex and grammatically consistent than his parents'. He had somehow filtered out their errors and reconstructed the proper rules of American Sign Language on his own. He creolized the language inside his own head. Lucas: Okay, so if all kids have this innate grammar-making machine, that must mean all languages are fundamentally complex, right? It kind of blows up the old, frankly colonial, idea of 'primitive' tribes with 'simple' languages.

Christopher: You've hit on the next major pillar of Pinker's argument. The idea that some languages are 'primitive' is a complete myth. He quotes the linguist Edward Sapir, who said, "When it comes to linguistic form, Plato walks with the Macedonian swineherd, Confucius with the headhunting savage of Assam." Lucas: That's a powerful line. It's saying there's no such thing as a simple language, regardless of the culture's technology or lifestyle. Christopher: Exactly. Every language ever discovered, from the tribes of New Guinea who were isolated for 40,000 years to the dialects spoken in inner-city America, has a rich and complex grammatical system capable of expressing any thought. The differences are superficial. In fact, the linguist William Labov did a famous study where he recorded speech from different social classes. He found that, by a consistent grammatical standard, working-class speech was often more grammatical than the rambling, unfinished sentences common in, say, academic conferences. Lucas: That's hilarious. So the idea that some people speak "bad grammar" is more about social prejudice than linguistic reality. Christopher: It's almost entirely about prejudice. Pinker loves to quote the saying, "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy." The distinction is political, not scientific. This leads him to dismantle another, even more popular myth: the idea that your language controls how you think. This is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Lucas: Right, this is the one I've definitely heard. The classic example is that Eskimos have hundreds of words for snow, so they perceive snow differently than we do. Christopher: And Pinker gleefully calls this "The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax." He traces the history of the claim and shows how it was wildly exaggerated. It started with the anthropologist Franz Boas mentioning a handful of different root words for snow—which, by the way, English has too, like sleet, slush, blizzard, avalanche. But the story got embellished with each retelling until you had newspapers claiming hundreds of words. Lucas: Wow, so this classic example we all hear about is... basically fake news? Why was it so popular? Christopher: Pinker argues it's appealing because it makes other cultures seem exotic, mystical, and fundamentally different from us. It's a form of intellectual tourism. Another famous example he debunks is the claim that the Hopi tribe has no concept of time because their language supposedly lacks words for past, present, and future. Lucas: I've heard that one too! That their worldview is timeless and cyclical. Christopher: Also a myth. Later linguists, who actually studied the language properly, found that the Hopi have tense, metaphors for time, units of time—they talk about the past and future just like anyone else. Whorf's analysis was just wrong. Lucas: So if language doesn't determine thought, what's the relationship? How do we think? Christopher: Pinker's answer is a concept he calls "Mentalese." He argues that thought is independent of any particular language. We think in a kind of abstract "language of thought," and our spoken language is just the tool we use to translate those thoughts into sounds for communication. Lucas: So, thinking 'I'm hungry' is the Mentalese part. Saying 'I'm hungry,' 'Tengo hambre,' or 'J'ai faim' is just the output device. The underlying thought is universal. Christopher: That's the idea exactly. You know this is true from your own experience. Have you ever had a thought but struggled to find the right words to express it? Or you read a paragraph and remember the gist of it, but not the exact sentences? That gist, that meaning, is Mentalese. If language was thought, you wouldn't be able to have a thought you couldn't put into words. Lucas: That makes so much sense. It also explains how we can coin new words or how translation between languages is even possible. You're not translating words; you're translating the underlying Mentalese concept. Christopher: Precisely. And it's why euphemisms and political doublespeak don't actually control our minds in the way people fear. When a politician talks about "enhanced interrogation techniques," we know they mean torture. The words don't magically change the concept in our heads. We see through the linguistic trick to the Mentalese underneath.

Lucas: Putting these two ideas together is really powerful. On one hand, you have children spontaneously generating hyper-complex grammar. On the other, you have the fact that all existing languages are already hyper-complex, and that this complexity serves a universal 'language of thought' that we all share. Christopher: It all points to the same conclusion. Language isn't a cultural artifact that shapes our minds. It’s a biological faculty, a universal human heritage that expresses our minds. It's an instinct. The diversity of languages in the world isn't a sign of different ways of thinking; it's a testament to the incredible creativity of this single, shared human instinct, which has blossomed into thousands of different forms, like a single seed growing into a thousand different-looking flowers. Lucas: It really changes how you see language. It’s not just a tool for communication; it’s a window into the very structure of the human mind. It’s something that connects us all at a fundamental, biological level. Christopher: And it makes you appreciate the "grammatical genius" of every three-year-old. They are not just mimicking; they are performing an act of creation that is one of the wonders of the natural world. They are running a biological program that is our species' unique gift. Lucas: That’s a beautiful way to put it. It makes you wonder, what other 'instincts' are shaping our lives that we just take for granted? Christopher: That's a fantastic question. We'd love to hear your thoughts. Find us on our socials and share what this brings up for you. What does it mean to you that language is an instinct? Lucas: It’s a deep one to ponder. A huge thank you to everyone for tuning in. Christopher: This is Aibrary, signing off.