There have been genes associated with human language and speech, most notably FoxP2. Language is created by societies and is learned by individuals but there is a genetic basis for it too. It is thought that the FoxP2 gene is inovlved in higher order language learning and speech ability, so I would say that all humans have a genetic innate ability to learn and use languages. But, you still have to learn a particular language that was constructed by society, groups, etc.

The entire makeup of a society and how it has evolved over time constitutes Culture. Language is a key factor in the development of the culture of a people. The young ones are instructed into their language through the interactions with their immediate and extended family as well as with society members. Language is not just a miraculous or innate feature that is etched on the lips of children as they are born. It is a beautiful artifact of their culture that must be learned. Best regards

Dickson Adom

I think it is cultural, a baby learns the language which is spoken around him not his/her mother tounge

I think it is innante, because when individual Nicaraguan deaf children were brought together for the first time they developed their own basic sign language. When younger deaf children joined the group they not only learned the sign language created by their older peers but developed it further by adding grammer.

I would argue that the language apparatus by which humans are capable of learning language is innate, but the actual syntax and structure of an individual language is something learned. Babies, for example, have an incredible ability to interpret body language and facial cues, but develop their "native" language over time through observation and repetition.

I asked this question 7 months ago. The answers to this point all are informative. Perhaps one might say the capacity for language (having a brain and a voice) are innate (people are born with them) but language itself (identifying and encoding abstractions) is created by hard collective problem solving. I added an article on RG just recently, Compression increases IQs that relates to this issue. Also, my article Mathematics knows things about physics that we don't, also on RG, from 2015, also bears on these issues.

Hi,

The problem, from my point of view, is to what extend the basic brain faculty which creates the semantic desctiption of the world, is innate. Also from my point of view - it is innate and all developed by the humans language-environments are based on it. The precise languge which is aquired in infancy has an influence only to some extend. I think this is because the interactions between the elements of this semantic basis can be expressed with different sets of rules, which are involved as properties at the language level. However, the main groups of concepts are the same as the brain has the capacity to create exactly them, automatically. Which are they - I am not aware of studies showing this. In all cases, the cross-languages comparative studies performed last years using different brain imaging techniques and approaches show that the brain activations are similar for basic concepts, independently of the language used to activate them.

I agree that language shapes the culture and vice-versae. I do think the same role is played by, for example, the religion. These are also inclarified questions, but they concern a more concrete level of the human society's overall behaviour.

In big, there are two approches to this language-related question: 1. to show the differences between the languages, saying that language is a cultural phenomenon and 2. to show the similarities between the languages. Linguists tend to underly the differencies, I have the implression. Such a scenario supposes that a newborn aquires a language and forms her conceptual world only becouse someone speeks to her. I have not found however an explanation who spoke to the first humans.

Regards,

Velina

Hi, language develops as a result of the ongoing interaction between brain, behavior and environment. I highly recommend a paper that gets to the heart of this very question - Short arms and talking eggs: Why we should no longer abide the nativist–empiricist debate

JP Spencer, MS Blumberg, B McMurray, SR Robinson, LK Samuelson, ...

Child Development Perspectives 3 (2), 79-87.

Best,

Lakshmi

Dr. Gogate

Thank you for your reference to the article about the `nativist-empiricist' debate, which provides an interesting perspective from a developmental point of view. The view of Otto Jespersen that development of language involves `energetics' or what we nowadays call thermodynamics remains, in my view, relevant and does not seem to be inconsistent with some of the observations in the article. It is possible to measure the role of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics as applied to networks in language development and in other areas of language such as glottochronology which gives some support to viewing language (at least in part) as a creation of collective problem solving.

Thank you again.

Bob Shour

Dear Robert Shour and readers,

Children acquire the capacity to use language reflexively and and effortlessly at a very early age. Given that we are organisms, the growth and development of any capacity depends on at least three factors: data from the environment, genetic endowment and more general factors, such as natural law (Chomsky 2005).

If one compares what children know about language with what they can extract from their environment, then one finds that they exhibit knowledge that is vastly richer then anything they could have extracted from the available data (Berwick et al.). Hence, the capacity to use language is largely determined by the second and third factors. Therefore, language is an internal biological property of an organism.

This is the basic view in biolinguists (Chomsky 2005). The question to what degree language is in some sense a cultural artefact is somewhat more opaque, but from a theoretical point of view, there is something that can be said. It appears to be the case that language consists of two systems, a core system that generates and interprets linguistic expressions and an ancillary system for externalization. If this is correct, then the use of language in a cultural context seems to be a rather remote from language itself, i. e. the core system (Chomsky 2011).

The article cited by Lakshmi J Gogate is indeed interesting. One might notice that the article denies pretty much any of the above made claims. So, it is worth pointing out that the approaches cited in the article are extensively discussed (and dismissed) in an article by Berwick et al.

Best,

Sven Beecken

• Noam Chomsky, Three Factors in Language Design, Linguistic Inquiry, Volume 36, Number 1, Winter 2005
• Noam Chomsky, Problems of projection, Lingua 130, 2013
• Robert C. Berwick, Paul Pietroski, Beracah Yankama, Noam Chomsky, Poverty of the Stimulus Revisited, Cognitive Science 35, 2011

why just one of them: an innate capacity enhanced by taking part in social interactions in the special socio-cultural , and economic context. therefore a kind of innate capacity as well as a cultural artifact or a learning tool work together to make us effective language users. best