The Linguistic Facts of Life 1

To disarm the strong and arm the weak would be to change the social

order which it is my job to preserve. Justice is the means by which

established injustices are sanctioned.

Anatole France, Crainquebille ([1901] 1949: iv)

All over the world, right at this moment, very young children are acquiring
a first language, and every one of them is going through the same stages at
just about the same ages. A child in Papua New Guinea and a child in
Carson City, Nevada, born on the same day, will mirror one another as they
go through those stages, even if one of them is acquiring Sign Language

and the other a spoken language.^1 In Nairobi or El Paso, Okinawa or
Bruges, the pattern is the same. It was the same for you, and for me and
for those who come after us.
One of the most important linguistic insights of the last century was
quite simple: this species-wide, universal phenomenon could not be
coincidental. Noam Chomsky proposed what now seems obvious:

The fact that all normal children acquire essentially comparable

grammars of great complexity with remarkable rapidity suggests that

human beings are somehow specially designed to do this, with data-

handling or “hypothesis-formulating” ability of unknown character

and complexity.

(Chomsky 1959: 62)

In other words, our brains are hard-wired for language; it’s in our DNA. A
child has the innate capacity to acquire language, something like a
blueprint in the mind that makes it possible to recognize and absorb the
structural patterns of language. He or she uses the data available in the
environment to build a mother tongue by filling in and adapting those
blueprints. Better understanding of this process came with the
identification of one (and as yet, the only identified) of the genes that
contribute to the language faculty. The FOXP2 gene was isolated by means