A MYRIAD OF TONGUES

An expansive look at how humans communicate.

Everett, a professor of anthropology and psychology and author of Numbers and the Making of Us, offers an enlightening examination of human communication based on the findings of linguist fieldworkers—himself included—as well as researchers in areas such as cognitive psychology, data science, and respiratory medicine. Whereas early theories about language commonalities and evolution were largely based on languages spoken in “Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) societies,” a wider range of inquiry into more than 7,000 languages has revealed “unexpected and profound” linguistic and cognitive diversity. The author discusses variations in words designating time and space, noting that “some aspects of time that seem so ‘natural’ to us English speakers may seem unnatural to speakers of many other languages.” Some languages have no tenses to indicate past, present, and future, while others have more than three tenses. Similarly, even within similar environments, “people talk about space in sometimes unpredictable ways”—e.g., using egocentric or geocentric ways of referring to spatial orientation. In denoting kinship, too, languages may vary according to the speaker’s relationship to another individual. In languages that have gendered nouns (Spanish, French, German), categorization of people and objects is motivated, “in some cases but not in others, by associations with biological sex.” Everett draws on abundant research investigating sensory words, such as those referring to color, taste, and smell, to reveal great variety “across the world’s languages. He identifies WEIRD languages as having a particularly “impoverished language of smells.” Physiognomy and environment contribute to linguistic diversity, as well. “The relationship between bite type and labiodental consonants,” writes the author, “ultimately hints at a relationship between the environments in which people live and some of the sounds they use to distinguish their thoughts when communicating.” Surprisingly, though, one word seems universal, “conveying a common thought in a predictable phonetic package”—the monosyllabic “huh.”

An engaging, informative overview of interesting linguistic matters.