FEW linguists doubt that natural selection has played a part in humans' linguistic ability. We shall speak. Our vocal tract is honed to produce the sonic richness and precision of speech. Animals couldn't speak even if they wanted to. In the 1960s, however, Noam Chomsky pushed the envelope with a radical proposal: a theory that humans have an innate mental apparatus specifically devoted to assembling words into sentences - an inborn "language organ." The literature on this, as intriguing as it may sound, would leave most readers alternately puzzled and drowsy. The idea is that a sentence starts in an almost unrecognizably abstract state, as a bare, treelike structure quite different from the ones some will recall from schoolroom diagraming. To say "He rolled the ball down the hill," for example, we hang "He" from the tree and then hang a separate sentence, "The ball rolled down the hill," a little ways over. Then "rolled" jumps left over "the ball" and lands on a hitherto empty branch. That branch's job is to jolt a verb like "rolled" into meaning the action of "He" rather than the action of the ball. O.K. Then, for reasons even more occult, "He" does its own leftward jump, abandoning the branch where it started - although this leaves no pause after "He" when we utter the sentence. All that to get a ball down a hill, and I left out some tricky bits. These phantom leaps make sense only with ingrown justifications that, by the year, have less and less to do with developments in psychology, biology or genetics. Yet adherents to Chomsky's theory can be pitilessly dismissive of detractors as just not up for serious abstraction. It is the Chomskyan take on language that Daniel L. Everett, a linguist best known for his work in the Amazon among the Piraha, challenges in "Language: The Cultural Tool." Chomsky argues that language is too complex, and mastered by children too quickly, for it to be a learned skill like riding a bicycle. There must be a genetic program for learning language, which as a pan-human trait should be applicable to any language a child hears. Languages seem so vastly different from one another, but for Chomskyans this is a mere matter of word shapes; in terms of how we put the words together, languages are all minor variations on a single universal grammar - the one underlying that jumping-He-on-the-tree phenomenon. Fiddle with some switches and English's grammar becomes Japanese's. Fiddle again and you get Mohawk, in which you say "He fish-likes" instead of "He likes fish." Babies just have to figure out which switches the language they're learning requires them to fiddle with. Yet after almost 50 years, serious evidence for a universal grammar remains elusive. Everett aptly quotes the psycholinguist Michael Tomasello's judgment - "Universal grammar is dead" - and adds: "It was a good idea. It didn't pan out." How humans learn language is much more easily accounted for by psychologists than the Chomskyans claim. Surely our brains and bodies have evolved to optimize our language abilities. However, no one supposes that our skill on bikes indicates a "bicycling organ." Rather, language piggybacks on vocal apparatuses and regions of the brain that evolved for other purposes in our animal forebears. Everett makes a case for language having arisen as a combination of three elements: "Cognition + Culture + Communication." "Language: The Cultural Tool," full of intellectually omnivorous insights and reminiscences about Everett's years with the Piraha (which he memorably described in "Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes"), is that rare thing: a warm linguistics book. The quiet smile perfusing his writing is all the more admirable given the criticisms he has endured from linguists wedded to the He-jumping school of thought. This nonconfrontational quality has its disadvantages, though. Everett covers Chomskyan syntax largely in passing, referring to it as "highly technical" and choosing not to dwell on its machinery, even to the extent I have here. This saps his argument of a certain force. To the uninitiated, "technical" alone may sound innocuous and even attractive, not like something to argue against for 300 pages. More problematic is that Everett emphasizes the "Culture" component of his "Cognition + Culture + Communication" formula to a point that misrepresents what human languages are. Of course culture shapes language, and Everett nicely covers many of the ways it does. Indigenous languages, for instance, often require specifying where things happen in relation to mountains and rivers, with a precision linked to the environment the language is spoken in. But most of speaking any language has nothing to do with its speakers' take on "culture," be this landscape, cosmology, sex, ethics or food. Yes, these arguments can be almost narcotically attractive, given that cultural diversity is always interesting. I once heard a linguist describe an American Indian language from California in which "yol" means mix, and when you add a prefix and say "sh-yol" it means mixing with a spoon, "m-yol" is mixing by heating, "s-yol" means sucking something down, and so on. When the lecturer said this was "cultural," the audience cooed as if being handed warm blueberry muffins. But who among the world's humans does not rather enjoy stirring, heating and slurping? Was there really something about those Californians that made them delight in such actions in a way that people in Massachusetts, Mesopotamia and India did not? Certainly this grammatical trait, like most, is a matter of chance - some languages drift into marking things that others don't. In French, the verb sortir is used to describe leaving, sticking out your tongue and being pulled out of a hole. Are the French somehow less culturally sensitive to the differences among those things than the British, or anyone else? Everett acknowledges that culture and language do not walk in lock step. But the essence of his text is statements like this: "We all possess grammars of happiness - our identities and our cultural cloaks." It would be hard to identify happiness in French's subjunctive mood endings, however, or in the fact that Mandarin has no word for "the." Everett finds culture the sexiest part of language, as we all probably do. Yet the He-jumping paradigm is based on the portion of language that has nothing to do with culture. And thus viable counterproposals must concentrate less on the specifics of culture than on the universalities of cognition, which increasing numbers of linguists are exploring. (Indeed it undersells the fascination of languages to paint them as merely, or mostly, mirrors of cultural distinctions, which linguists devote much less time to in their work than many books on linguistics for the general public imply.) Still, "Language" is a useful study of a burgeoning theory compatible with Darwinism, anthropology, psychology and philosophy - an interdisciplinary orientation the Chomskyans have largely spurned. One need not subscribe to the idea of grammar as a reflection of "values" to enjoy Everett's perspective on the future of linguistic science. Everett challenges Chomsky, arguing that when it comes to how we learn language, culture trumps biology. John McWhorter teaches linguistics, Western civilization and American studies at Columbia University. His latest book is "What Language Is (and What It Isn't and What It Could Be)."

Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazon Jungle, 2008, etc.) challenges Noam Chomsky, arguing that grammar and language are learned. The author begins and ends with images of fire, calling language "the cognitive fire." After some obligatory comments about how he intends to be fair with his opponents, he soars off into his thesis about how language is a tool--one that we acquire rather than inherit genetically, rather like a bow and arrow. Throughout, Everett endeavors to leaven his otherwise heavy narrative with anecdotes (especially about his years living with the Amazonian Pirah) and with allusions to music and to popular culture--among others, he looks at Phil Spector, George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Mick Jagger and the Lone Ranger and Tonto. The author dismisses the idea that there's a "language gene," and he explains linguistic terms like Zipf's Law, discreteness, contingency and recursion. He finds ways to chip chinks in Chomsky's armor and dives gleefully into the controversy surrounding Benjamin Whorf, who maintained that our languages circumscribe our thoughts. Everett closely examines the Pirah, noting that they have no words for numbers or colors, but mothers nonetheless know how many children they have. He pauses now and then for more extensive explanations of related topics, like cross-cultural ideas of kinship, noting that our (American) terms for first and second cousin (and the notion of "removed") are disappearing because we no longer use them. The author grieves at the loss of any language, takes a shot or two at public schools for their failure to teach about dialects and notes how each language makes its speakers happy. Readers' eyes will sometimes sparkle with new insight, sometimes glaze at the dense exposition.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Everett (dean of arts and sciences, Bentley Univ.) has been a linguistics professor and/or department chair at various higher-education institutions in the US and England. This is his second book aimed primarily at general readers; he has also written a textbook and scholarly papers. Drawing from multiple disciplines, he counters the hypothesis that humans are genetically hardwired to learn language, arguing that of the nature/nurture dichotomy nurture plays a more important role in the development of languages. Field research over three decades lends sincerity and credibility to his theory; Everett has studied nearly two dozen languages firsthand, including many indigenous languages of the Americas. He adds numerous personal stories to illustrate his points. These candid accounts add greatly to the book's appeal, as does his witty, sometimes irreverent tone. His principal aim is to show how culture-specific needs and values direct the evolution of individual languages. Everett uses linguistic terminology and provides authentic syntactic and morphological examples, but he is adept at explaining and contextualizing them. An appealing book inside the academy as well as outside. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers. K. C. Williams Mercyhurst College

Everett once believed that language, like a muscle or an eye, manifests the biological powers inherent in the human genome. But after decades of intense linguistic study, much of it fieldwork among the Pirahã of the Amazon Basin, he now espouses a different view, namely, that language, like music or silverware, originated as an invention of creatures who venture far beyond genetic inevitability. Readers who hold out for biologically oriented accounts of language must confront a wealth of linguistic evidence showing that society shapes language and that language in turn shapes society. Everett shows, for instance, how the Pirahã use their phonetic system to define gender boundaries, while Anglos use their distinctive lexicon to safeguard personal liberty. Even grammar, as it turns out, reflects varying cultural imperatives. Connecting Aristotle's musings upon man's social instinct with modern social scientists' probings into the evolutionary dynamics of syntactical hierarchy, Everett unfolds a compelling analysis of how language informs all the activities we recognize as distinctively human. A linguistic study certain to attract many general readers.--Christensen, Bryce Copyright 2010 Booklist

Is language a genetically programmed instinct or something we pick up from the culture around us? This central controversy in linguistics and philosophy is roiled in this unfocused but stimulating treatise. Challenging Noam Chomsky, Steven Pinker, and other partisans of "nativism," which holds that certain kinds of knowledge are hard-wired into us (e.g., Chomsky's "universal grammar" underlying all languages), linguist Everett (Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes) argues that language is a practical tool for communicating and social bonding, determined by cultural needs and the practicalities of information sharing, that children learn through general intelligence. His sketchy, disorganized treatment touches on neuroscience, linguistics, and information theory; most tellingly, he spotlights nativists' failure to demonstrate that any meaningful universal grammar exists. Along the way, Everett regales readers with the quirks of the Amazonian Indian languages and cultures he studies-some have no words for numbers or colors-in anecdotes that are sometimes cogent but often just colorful. Everett's rambling, overstuffed exposition often loses its thread, and his discussion of cultural influences on language can be more truistic than incisive. Still, readers who hack through the undergrowth will find a compelling riposte to the reigning orthodoxies in linguistics. Photos. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.