The Evolution of Language

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There are six or seven thousand languages spoken in the world to day. Most people would say well over a hundred thousand languages spoken a and those languages are all products of evolution on the he cultural, historical track. So there's a really strong interplay between that kind of historical evolution, or cultural evolution track and ah, the biological wherewithal for understanding language. I'm not sure if we can say just yet if we've been biologically changed because of language, but, i mean, certainly people would say yes,.

We describe the world using language — we can’t help it. And we all know that ordinary language is an imperfect way of communicating rigorous scientific statements, but sometimes it’s the best we can do. Linguist N.J. Enfield argues that the difficulties run more deeply than we might ordinarily suppose. We use language as a descriptive tool, but its origins are found in more social practices — communicating with others to express our feelings and persuade them to agree with us. As such, the very structure of language itself reflects these social purposes, and we have to be careful not to think it provides an unfiltered picture of reality.

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N.J. Enfield received his Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Melbourne. He is currently a professor of linguistics and Director of the Sydney Social Sciences and Humanities Advanced Research Centre at the University of Sydney. His recent book is Language vs. Reality: Why Language Is Good for Lawyers and Bad for Scientists.

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