Imagine growing up without words. You live in a typical industrialized household, but you are somehow unable to learn the language of your parents. That means that you do not have access to education; you cannot properly communicate with your family other than through a set of idiosyncratic gestures; you never get properly exposed to abstract ideas such as “justice” or “global warming.” All you know comes from direct experience with the world.

What Lack Of Language Practically Means

It might seem that this scenario is purely hypothetical. There aren’t any cases of language deprivation in modern industrialized societies, right? It turns out there are. Many deaf children born into hearing families face exactly this issue. They cannot hear and, as a result, do not have access to their linguistic environment. Unless the parents learn sign language, the child’s language access will be delayed and, in some cases, missing completely.

Lack Of Language Is Not A Scenario. It’s Some People’s Reality. 

Does our mind develop normally under such circumstances? Of course not. Language enables us to receive vast amounts of information we would have never acquired otherwise. The details of your parents’ wedding. The Declaration of Independence. The entrée section of the dinner menu. The entire richness of human experience condensed into a linear sequence of words. Take language away, and the amount of information you can acquire decreases dramatically.

Language And The Mind

The lack of language affects even functions that do not seem to be intrinsically “linguistic,” such as math. Developmental research shows that keeping track of exact numbers above four requires knowing the words for these numbers. Imagine trying to tell the difference between seven apples and eight apples. The task becomes almost impossible if you can’t count them—and you can’t count them if you never learn that “seven” is followed by “eight.” As a result of this language-number interdependency, many deaf children fall behind in math, precisely because they did not learn to count early on.

Language And Number Interdepedency

Another part of your mind that needs language to develop properly is social cognition. Think about your interactions with your family and friends. Why is your mom upset? Why did your friend go inside the house just now? Understanding social situations requires inferring what the people around you are thinking.

Language And Social Cognition

Ludwig Wittgenstein claimed that “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world”; So far, the evidence does suggest that the limits of our language mean the limits of our world. However, what happens if language disappears once the mind is fully developed? Will we then lose the ability to use math and understand others?

What If Language Is There And Then It Disappears? 

Imagine you are a typical adult; let’s say you’re 40. You wake up one day, and suddenly, you realize that your language is gone. You look around the room, but no words come to mind to describe the objects you see. You’re starting to plan out your day, but no half-formed phrases rush through your mind. You unlock your smartphone, but, instead of text, you see a sea of squiggles. Desperate, you cry out for help, and someone rushes up to you—but, instead of speech, all you hear is meaningless murmur.

Nightmare Scenario: You Wake Up And Your Language Is Gone

The condition described above is known as global aphasia. It arises from severe damage to the brain, often as a result of a massive stroke. While some aphasias are temporary, in some cases the damage is irreparable, and the person may lose language for life. In your case, let’s say that a dozen doctors examined you and said (or, you think they said) that nothing can be done. If the limits of your language mean the limits of your world, should you conclude that the way you experience the world is now fundamentally limited? Do you even have a mind?

Again, Not A Scenario. It’s A Reality, Called Global Aphasia. 

Research on adult individuals with aphasia has demonstrated that math, theory of mind, and many other cognitive abilities are independent from language. Patients with severe language impairments perform comparably to the rest of us when asked to complete arithmetic tasks, reason about people’s intentions, determine physical causes of actions, or decide whether a drawing depicts a real-life event. Some of them play chess in their spare time. Some even engage in creative tasks. Soviet composer Vissarion Shebalin continued to write music even after a stroke that left him severely aphasic.

Loss Of Language Doesn’t Equal Loss Of Mind

In recent years, neuroscientists have isolated a network of brain regions (typically in the left hemisphere) that react almost exclusively to linguistic input. They respond to written sentences, spoken narratives, words, monologues, conversations, but will not activate in response to memory tasks, spatial reasoning, music, math, or social situations that do not involve dialogue. No wonder many patients with aphasia do not have impairments in other cognitive domains—language and other functions are housed in separate chunks of brain matter.

Language Is Separate From The Rest Of Cognition

Many great thinkers have drawn a strong connection between language and the mind. Oscar Wilde called language “the parent, and not the child, of thought”; Ludwig Wittgenstein claimed that “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world”; and Bertrand Russell stated that the role of language is “to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.”

Language And The Mind - The Writers’ Perspective

Not all writers support Wittgenstein’s and Russell’s idea that language and thought are inseparable. Tom Lubbock, a British writer and illustrator whose language system gradually deteriorated because of a brain tumor, wrote in his memoir shortly before his death in 2011:““My language to describe things in the world is very small, limited. My thoughts when I look at the world are vast, limitless and normal, same as they ever were. My experience of the world is not made less by lack of language but is essentially unchanged.”

Language And The Mind - A Language-less Writer’s Perspective

So, what can we say about the role language plays in shaping our minds? Well, pick a mind that is still developing, and you will find that removing language will alter it for life. However, pick a mind that is fully formed and take all words away, and you will discover that the rest of cognition remains mostly intact. Our language is but a scaffold for our minds: indispensable during construction but not necessary for the building to remain in place.

Once We Acquire Language, We Can Live Without It

Language is the dress of thought.

Language is what makes us human, what lies at the root of our awareness, our intellect, our sense of self. Without it, we cannot plan, cannot communicate, cannot think. Or can we?

Once we acquire language, we can live without it.

Language Is the Scaffold of the Mind

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky 1821 – 1881), sometimes transliterated as Dostoyevsky, was a Russian novelist, short story writer, essayist, and journalist. Dostoevsky's literary works explore the human condition in the troubled political, social, and spiritual atmospheres of 19th-century Russia, and engage with a variety of philosophical and religious themes.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Demons (sometimes also called The Possessed or The Devils) is a novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Demons is a social and political satire, a psychological drama, and large-scale tragedy. The novel was first published in 1873. “People who can speak well, speak briefly.”-Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Demons

Demons (Dostoevsky novel)

Demons is an allegory of the potentially catastrophic consequences of the political and moral nihilism that were becoming prevalent in Russia in the 1860s.It’s a fictional town that descends into chaos as it becomes the focal point of an attempted revolution. The underlying allegorical context is about "demonic" forces that take possession of the town.

Demons as allegory

“Demons” in this sense refers not so much to individuals as to the ideas that possess them. For Dostoevsky, 'ideas' are living cultural forces that have the capacity to seduce and subordinate the individual consciousness, and the individual who has become alienated from his own concrete national traditions is particularly susceptible.

Meaning of the term “Demons”

In late 1860s Russia there was an unusual level of political unrest caused by student groups influenced by liberal, socialist, and revolutionary ideas. Dostoevsky offers commentary on the relationship of the ideas of his own generation to those of the current generation.

Background of Demons

ThemesMuch of the plot develops out of the tension between belief and non-belief, and the words and actions of most of the characters seem to be intimately bound to the position they take up within this struggle.Dostoevsky saw atheism as the root cause of Russia's deepening social problems.In Demons the Russian man has lost his true national identity (inextricably linked, for Dostoevsky, with the Orthodox Christian faith) and tries to fill the void with ideas derived from Western modes of thought.

Themes

Dostoevsky saw Russia's growing suicide rate as a symptom of the decline of religious faith and the concomitant disintegration of social institutions like the family. Self-destruction as a result of atheism or loss of faith is a major theme in Demons.There are four actual suicides described in the novel.

Suicide

Demons as satireDostoevsky took great pains to derive the novel's characters and story from real people and real ideas of the time. As prophecySince the Russian Revolution, many commentators have remarked on the prophetic nature of Demons.

Demons as satire and Prophecy

“One must be a great man indeed to be able to hold out even against common sense. Or else a fool.”-Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Demons

Quote from the Novel

Demons (Dostoevsky novel) - Wikipedia

Humans have an innate language instinct, which allows them to tackle communication on a whole other level.<ul><li>Since children learn grammar without studying it, they must have an innate capability to understand it.</li><li>There are two central principles behind all languages, which make them learnable.</li><li>You don’t have to worry about correct grammar so much, as its rules are only one part of using language correctly.</li></ul>

A Natural At Learning Languages

<ul><li> Language is the biological adaptation to communicate.</li><li> There have been anthropological studies of tribes that had no contact with the larger world until the 1920s. Among those tribes, language was acquired seamlessly, without specific instruction. </li><li>The human capacity for language is termed by the author as “Mentalese.” </li><li>Humans acquired language through their biology. This innate possession of language a “Universal Grammar.”</li><li>This proclamation ran counter to the social science theories of the time, which contended that language had to be deliberately taught by adults.</li></ul>

Defining Language

Since children learn languages as early as 18 months old, but can only learn from observing adults that do it the right way, they have no way of actively telling what’s right from wrong – they’re not studying languages, they just absorb them.Yet they still apply the right rules at the right time. For example, even deaf children apply the correct grammar, just by learning sign language from their parents.

Early Instinct

Children have a “window” for maximum language learning, while adults tend to have trouble learning a second language. This window must exist because children around four years old learn grammar and vocabulary so quickly; this exponential learning cannot be explained by adult intervention or guidance. Language learning can be encouraged, and children must be in a social environment to absorb language, but the exact words they remember and the grammar they display probably has a biological basis.

The Window To Learn A Language

All languages are based on the same two core principles.How come we can talk so effortlessly to one another? What is it about language that makes it so easy to communicate with it? There are two forces at play here:<ul><li>The arbitrariness of the sign.</li><li>Our infinite use of finite media.</li></ul>

The Two Core Principles

The form words take doesn’t have a direct relation to their meaning.For example the word “cat” doesn’t sound like a cat. The sound cats make is “meow” and they’re silent when they walk, whereas “cat” is a pretty strong, snappy, short and loud word.This is a good thing, because it keeps us from trying to decipher what the word “cat” means by thinking about the way it sounds and instead lets us jump instantly to the result, because we’ve paired the word with the image through generations of rote learning instead.

Signs Are Arbitrary

This principle allows us to express anything and everything, because even though the number of words in any given language is limited, the number of combinations of words isn’t. Since we use the rules of grammar to create our own sentences, we’re not limited in how much we can express, which makes it easier to get your point across.

Infinite Use Of Finite Media

Grammar is a crucial part of language, and it pays to know it well. However, while you’d be punished horribly in school in the 1920s for bad grammar, today it’s not such a big deal, mainly because grammar rules are only one type of rules that determine how well you use language.Grammar rules are prescriptive, which means they tell us how we’re supposed to talk or write. More and more though, scientists are concerned with descriptive rules, which describe how we actually talk.

Grammar Is Getting Worse, But It's Okay

You can be very much descriptively correct with your grammar, while being wrong in a prescriptive sense, just like a driver can follow the rules of physics in his car while breaking the laws of the country he’s driving in. Correct grammar is very much a relative thing, so don’t stress too much about it!

The Right Grammar Is Subjective

The theory that language is an instinct has opened up the possibility that humans have had access to language learning for about 2.5 million years. There are specific genes and regions of the brain that develop to allow the individual to practice language.While popular media accounts claim that chimpanzees can learn American Sign Language, most data suggest that chimpanzees are not mentally wired to acquire language. They lack the language instinct that humans possess.

Our Brains Are Hard-Wired For Learning Language

The audible signals people can produce are not a series of crisp beeps like on a touch-tone phone. Speech is a river of breath, bent into hisses and hums by the soft flesh of the mouth and throat.

Humans are so innately hardwired for language that they can no more suppress their ability to learn and use language than they can suppress the instinct to pull a hand back from a hot surface.

 We are born with an innate capability to understand languages.

The classic book on the development of human language by the world’s leading expert on language and the mind. In this classic, the world's expert on language and mind lucidly explains everything you always wanted to know about language: how it works, how children learn it, how it changes, how the brain computes it, and how it evolved. With deft use of examples of humor and wordplay, Steven Pinker weaves our vast knowledge of language into a compelling story: language is a human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution. The Language Instinct received the William James Book Prize from the American Psychological Association and the Public Interest Award from the Linguistics Society of America. This edition includes an update on advances in the science of language since The Language Instinct was first published.

Stashed ideas

The Language Instinct

People tend to converge toward the language they observe around them, whether it's copying word choices, mirroring sentence structures, mimicking pronunciations or mimicking speech sounds they expect to hear - even if they never actually hear them. Linguists call this phenomenon "linguistic convergence.

Mimicking How Others Speak

Convergence refers to the shifts people make to their speech to approximate that of those around them.Code-switching or style-shifting can also be examples of convergence, as long as the shift is toward an interlocutor – the person you’re talking to. But people can also shift away from an interlocutor, and this is called “divergence.”Code-switching and style-shifting can occur for other reasons, too, like how you feel, what you’re talking about and how you want to be perceived. You might drop your G’s more and say things like “thinkin’” when reminiscing about a prank you played in high school.

Defining Convergence

Accentual convergence means that people perceive accents as coherent collections of different linguistic features.Over exaggerated convergence can be perceived as mocking or patronizing.If you don't have an actual speech target to converge toward, you might resort to inaccurate, simplistic or stereotyped ideas about how someone will speak.However, subtler shifts - in what might be called the "sweet spot" of convergence - can have a number of benefits, from social approval to more efficient and successful communication.

He Talks Like I Do

We often imitate styles of speech we hear – what’s known as ‘linguistic convergence.’ But a researcher wanted to see if we alter our speech based on the mere expectation of how someone will sound.

What makes us subconsciously mimic the accents of others in conversation

Heritage language learners can sometimes feel like a failure for not being fluent before they've even given themselves a chance to try. Finding the right tools, setting realistic goals and acknowledging existing skills can make the process of learning your parents' language more fun and fulfilling.

Learning A New Language

Many heritage language learners are taught that multilingualism is not a path to success, only to realize, much later in life, that it's actually a considerable asset.First things first, give yourself some credit!

Give Yourself Some Credit

<ul><li>Break down your language skills into four major categories: listening, speaking, reading, writing, and listening</li><li>Identify your strengths and then build on them to become better at your chosen skill.</li><li>You are less likely to stop trying to improve if you begin with strengths and build upon them.</li></ul>

Build On Your Strengths

<ul><li>Knowing what you want to do with your language will help you prioritize what you need to learn.</li><li>You're a heritage speaker, not a native speaker. The goal of native fluency is not practical, so take that pressure off yourself.</li></ul>

Decide What You Want to Do With Your Language

<ul><li>If an in-person class isn't an option for you, there are plenty of online tools.</li><li>There are hundreds of apps and websites available online.</li><li>They explore different cultures and languages around the world and share what they’ve learned.</li><li>Use online tools to help them learn their heritage languages.</li></ul>

Find The Tools That Work For You

<ul><li>Ignore the ads for language learning courses or apps that say you'll be fluent in no time</li><li>Remember what you love most about learning your heritage language</li><li>Have conversations with your mom in Korean instead of English</li><li>Sing along to your favourite salsa song in the car with the windows open so everyone can hear you learn all the words</li></ul>

Focus on The Joy

Heritage language learners are different from people learning a second language for the first time. They often grow up hearing it, but that can come with its own set of challenges. Experts offer their advice on how to learn your heritage language.

Language Is the Scaffold of the Mind

Demons (Dostoevsky novel) - Wikipedia

The Language Instinct

What makes us subconsciously mimic the accents of others in conversation

How to learn a heritage language : Life Kit

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