Michael Miller

Psy 115W

9-9-02

The Language Instinct:

A reaction to the first 2 chapters of Pinker’s book

Pinker does a phenomenal job of convincing the reader that language is indeed something found in the human genome and is transmitted genetically and not verbally. His example of Simon and how the young deaf boy could only learn the misused sign language of his parents, he manipulated what he knew into a very traditional looking ASL. If he only saw his parents poor signing, than there must be an instinct in the human brain that allows certain constructions to be recognized and manipulated as is done in most modern languages. The implications of a language instinct are becoming more profound with today’s growing technology. Although that statement sounds a little off base, with the internet growing and be using by the numbers of people all over the world, the conceptual distance from China to Tennessee is but a mere hyperlink. The natural barriers of physical impairments (i.e. mountains, rivers, etc.) and distance are being eliminated by the technological explosion of late. Language in itself has been considered a barrier between cultures; however, if Pinker is indeed completely correct, the interaction between younger and younger people of far different ethnic backgrounds could result in new pidgins popping up throughout various peoples in the world. These pidgins, if developed into creoles as happened in Hawaii, these creoles could be shared using the vast connectability of the internet. To examine the full implications of the language instinct, one must take it another step further. If children or even adults who begin to communicate across language barriers using different pidgins that work between two cultures, invariably, the possibility of unifying all cultures under a single language is not so far fetched. Since most cultures follow the same basic rules of grammar as Pinker stated then the only real differences between various languages is the vocabulary. Granted, some languages have much more specific verb usage and different distinguishing modifiers. For example, a Mayan civilization that still lives on today as different words for both older sister and younger sister, while in English sister is an accepted description for both. If these “vocabulary barriers” (a much better way to state the language differences found in cultures) can be slowly picked away by developing pidgins, then there is nothing to stop a globalization of language and communication in such a way that a better cultural understanding of all the world is not that far out of reach.