stands on its own. Recursion is the feature which Chomsky and his fellow
workers declared was universal, but the Piraha case negates this claim,
Everett says (p. 200).
Culture and language go together but do not always match each other
directly. Everett’s main argument is simply that language itself is a cultural
tool. If so it is also a veryflexible tool available for changes to be made.
Language is porous and can easily absorb new terms and meanings.
Neither language nor culture is static. So in saying that culture produces
language we must not impute rigidity to this process. We must instead
break the frame of rigidity and recognize the prevalence offluidity.
The discussion so far has served to make problematic any innatist
argument about language. At the same time, in assigning language to
the same conventional realm of culture as all learned behavior, it points
clearly to possibilities of changes in language because culture itself is
constantly changing. Also, while wefind that the vocabulary of a language
can change rapidly, its basic grammar shifts more slowly, so that gramma-
tical forms may persist that date from an earlier time and are no longer in
step with other aspects of culture. Rules of gender accord are candidates
for this interpretation in European languages that owe a part of their
origin to Latin, and more remotely Greek. There clearly are psychologi-
cally common-sense aspects to some of these rules but it is hard to show
how they could possibly apply overall. Everett gives a comparable example
from Amazonia. In the Banawa family of languages, which spans Peru and
Brazil, feminine forms of gender marking predominate and are exclusively
used forfirst and second pronoun usages, regardless of the gender of the
speaker or the person referred to. Banawa culture also happens to stress
segregation of the sexes and has elaborate initiation rites for young
females, but neither of these facts explains why the language has gramma-
tical rules that make all actors feminine other than as a grammatical device
used to provide grammatical co-ordination in sentences by marking sub-
jects of verbs (as happens also in French).
What overall message about language and culture can we convey, then?
First, since language itself is a part of culture this is not a relationship
between two separate‘things’. So much is axiomatic. Second, however,
language is not all of culture, since there are many material and embodied
practices as well as aesthetic forms of expression that exist without the
intervention of language. Third, nevertheless all of culture tends to get
back into language when activities are named and/or described. Taken as
a whole, each language therefore encapsulates reference to many sectors
8 LANGUAGE AND CULTURE 73