A bold and provocative study that presents language not as an innate component of the brain--as most linguists argue--but as a tool unique to each culture worldwide, and as essential to human society as fire.

Reviews

""Language: The Cultural Tool," full of intellectually omnivorous insights and reminiscences about Everett's years with the Piraha . . . is that rare thing: a warm linguistics book. . . . A useful study of a burgeoning theory compatible with Darwinism, anthropology, psychology and philosophy--an interdisciplinary orientation the Chomskyans have largely spurned."
--"The New York Times Book Review"
"Ambitious. . . . [Everett] doesn't shy from making big claims."
--"The New York Times"
"["Language"] deserves a serious reading."
--"The Economist"
"[Everett's book] is revelatory. There is nothing about humans that is quite as astonishing as language."
--"The Guardian" (London)
"Everett has . . . produced a book whose importance is almost impossible to overstate. This is an intellectual cri de Coeur and a profound celebration of human diversity. After reading it, you will--should--care as much about disappearing languages as you do about the clubbed seal or the harpooned whale. . . . A very rich but also very readable book. Everett is not the first to challenge the reign of Chomsky, but he is the most accessible, and, thanks to his years in Amazonia, the most-intimately informed."
--"The Sunday Times "(London)
"A must-read for anyone having an interest in knowing what makes us human. . . . Everett resets the research agenda for linguistics, psychology, and neuroscience towards finding out how our biological endowment and culture interact, to form and shape the rich diversity apparent as we view the human condition."
--Philip Lieberman, Fred M. Seed Professor of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences, Professor of Anthropology, Brown University
"Everett mounts an impassioned argument that language has adaptively emerged as our species' 'tool' for achieving social collectivity via discourse. He sharply questions today's doctrinal wisdom in the field of linguistics by giving it a pendulum-push back in