Evolutionary biology can help us understand how language works

Source: The Conversation, 10 October 2017

, Professor in Linguistics and Philology, Uppsala University

As a linguist I dread the question, “what do you do?”, because when I answer “I’m a linguist” the inevitable follow-up question is: “How many languages do you speak?” That, of course, is not the point. While learning languages is a wonderful thing to do, academic linguistics is the scientific study of language.

What I do in my work is to try to understand how and why languages are the way they are. Why are there so many in some places and so few in others? How did languages develop so many different ways of fulfilling the same kinds of communicative tasks? What is uniquely human about language, and how do the human mind and language shape each other? This is something of a new direction in linguistics. The old-school study of language history was more concerned with language for its own sake: understanding the structure of languages and reconstructing their genealogical relationships.

Read more... >>>>>>