What if there were no languages

It is dependent on its parents for survival. In the absence of a common language there would be no communication, and, therefore, no family. The paternity of the child could not be established. Only the mother could be identified. Where knowledge does not exist, it is difficult to establish any connection between the sexual act and the birth, notwithstanding the period of nine months that elapses before the child is born. Even this connection is made possible by the use of language. The establishing of the family unit and the restriction of sexual relations to couples in humans require the use of language.

In such a milieu, the child can only recognize its mother. It would not be easy for a mother to feed her child all by herself. Man cannot be compared with other living beings. Most of the living creatures begin to walk, to fly and seek food a very short time after they are born. The majority of the species of animals are programmed to protect themselves. The long lasting maintenance of the human baby - the weakest of all living beings - is secured thanks to the culture and the communication the language provides.

The faculty of thinking through the use of words replaces the innate programming of other living beings. The account is powerful and moving, I find, and Schaller says that it changed both of their lives. The breakthrough was both internal and external, simultaneously cognitive and social. For Schaller, the experience stuck with her, and she eventually sought out work on language-less adults.

How many people are language-less? I have no idea, but Schaller does some hypothetical estimates that I found pretty shocking:. The first book is about one languageless person I met. But many people have treated him as a freak, a once-in-a-lifetime thing. And I knew this happens all the time. Out of that ten percent, one percent is profoundly deaf. So they have no handicap! I doubt very much that her last point is accurate, but the key to this paragraph is to think about the numbers.

That is, if anyone is willing to sign to the unfortunate isolated individual at all — the tragic and disturbing fact is, as Schaller highlights, some groups are ideological opposed to making concessions, demanding that deaf individuals try to adapt to an unmoved and unmoving hearing population. There are examples of communities of deaf people spontaneously inventing new sign languages, but the case of a profoundly deaf individual in a hearing community, isolated from other individuals struggling to communicate visually, would offer little opportunity for this kind of innovation see, for example, the case of Nicaraguan Sign Language, discussed here and here.

What is it like to live without language? For him, that was the dark time. This is the bad time. Schaller is also passionate about the human rights of the deaf, and deeply critical of the movement to mainstream deaf children to the detriment of sign language learning.

For example, the use of cochlear implants with deaf children can be seen as directly undermining the possibility that deaf kids will find a place in a signing community although it increases their chances of getting by in the majority hearing community. The use of cochlear implants and speech-only teaching methods, forcing children to, as much as possible, learn to lip read or build upon whatever artificially-enhanced hearing they might be able to get, is especially controversial in the deaf community.

I had an MAA Master of Applied Anthropology student who did fascinating research on the deaf community in Australia, and she found that many members felt that their community was dying at the hands of these technologies and teaching ideologies this is all particularly ironic because my home university, Macquarie, is a centre for research on cochlear implants. In fact, I can see both sides of this argument although I favour the use of sign language; I worked as a teaching aide in a school for the deaf, and once upon a time, could hold my own in sign.

For parents of deaf children, however, it must seem terrifying to have a child who will fundamentally live in a different community, within a deaf subculture, perhaps with diminished opportunities, justifying virtually any intervention.

But before I start down this road and in to material I teach in my human rights classes , I want to get back to the question of cognition. Language-first models predict that thought is more or less limited by the absence of language, the strongest suggesting that most of thought would be disrupted, and posit a definitive break in the forms of cognition available once human had produced language.

In anthropology, Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf are frequently credited with bringing into sharp focus the role of language in shaping perception and cognition, although they arguably offered a less deterministic account of the relationship than some language-first philosophers see our posts, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is right… sort of? Their approach suggests that language biases perception, affecting how people are capable of perceiving, making some ideas or even qualities of the phenomenal world, more or less difficult to perceive.

Coupled with work like that of Hespos and Spelke, the work on language biasing perception suggests that pre-linguistic perception is actually more attuned to sensory discrimination that may later disappear if not buttressed by language; that is, the pre-linguistic conceptual world is perhaps more attuned to certain gradations, less likely to overlook intermediate or uncategorized sensations.

Ironically, he seemed to understand certain sorts of symbolic processes, such as performative identity. In fact, of course, the division is not really visible-invisible after all, border police are quite visible when they arrest a person , nor is it symbolic-non-symbolic macho behaviour, after all, is a symbolically rich performance.

The degree of arbitrariness, for example, or the hierarchical nature of some symbols — premised on other symbols — might make them particularly opaque to the language-less.

How could a languageless man have any idea of what is happening in the head? But I was just hoping that there were enough cultural clues, and he was an observant man. I was grasping at straws. So I would mime having this idea in my head with my fists close to my head and then I would throw it out at your head, as my hands opened.

I did as many variations as I could, again, over and over-hours, days, hours, days. Frustrating-the most frustrating task in my life! Of course, from some perspectives, she was crazy.

Even after language, however, some ways of seeing the world were difficult to grasp. Time was the hardest thing for him to learn. Think about it. For twenty-seven years, he followed the sun. He followed cows. He followed the seasons. As the interviewer points out, many languages do not treat time as an abstract, spatialized, undifferentiated flow but highlight differentiation, seasonality and sequence. Some conceptualize time as necessarily sequential today is not like tomorrow or as inherently differentiated summer is fundamentally not like winter.

Time is a classic example discussed by Whorf to highlight the links between culture, language and perception, and even though his account of time has been criticized on a number of grounds, anthropologists still tend to agree that understandings of time can differ, and that Western treatment of time as a kind of flow through undifferentiated, measurable durations is just one version or inflection of the sense of time with its own distinctive emphases.

Time, for example, may be difficult to perceive in certain ways if you are not culturally trained to habitually conducting yourself in relation to time appropriately: certainly, there is deep cultural difference in the degree to which people orient themselves by the clock, and varying emphases that societies place on recurrence or irreversibility of time.

But what about those without language? He had survived into adulthood, crossed into the US, kept himself from being mowed down in traffic or starving to death. Schaller highlights that learning language isolated Ildefonso from other languageless individuals. Schaller explains:. The only thing he said, which I think is fascinating and raises more questions than answers, is that he used to be able to talk to his other languageless friends. They found each other over the years.

I agree with Schaller, and I suspect that Ildefonso might be suggesting a way in which certain cognitive skills and communicative channels had actually atrophied with the incursion of language into his life, or even become impossible once language had intruded upon them. Language was not simply an addition to his cognitive repertoire; it may have displaced or disrupted other forms of thought and interaction.

From the perspective of a language-saturated world this seems improbable; we tend to think of ourselves as cognitively complete, profoundly abled, without limit. But clearly Ildefonso and other languageless individuals had to find some way to compensate for their deficits, whether it was through mimetic thinking which is one possibility or through some other constellation of adaptations.

This languageless cognition would not be simply prelinguistic, childlike thought because adult languageless individuals function much more adeptly than four-year-olds. But how this non-linguistic, adult cognition might operate, what it might include, is a bit of a mystery and seems fragile in the face of language learning. Likewise, we find other primates who are non-linguistic are often good problem solvers without imitating or imitating much less adeptly than humans.

So can people have thought without words? Ildefonso had managed to survive, and clearly had thoughts, but he was also obviously confused by some basic qualities of the language-saturated world in which he had to live, not least of which was social interaction.

The evidence that Schaller presents on the relationship of language to different cognitive skills correlates also with the evidence from child development, widely recognized as demonstrating a progression through skills of varying complexity. Not all words are equally easy to learn, nor is every cognitive ability equally dependent upon language although some functions might be accomplished both pre-linguistically and post-linguistically using different mechanisms, so that continuity of function masks discontinuity of means.

To be honest, I wish I could write something deeper and more interesting about the case. Even when I find that I have not been engaged in an inner dialogue, it is like waking from a sleep, unable to recall a dream that fast slips away.

A Talk With Daniel L. Everett on Edge: The Third Culture. Stumble It! Image of Susan Schaller from her website. Frank, Michael C.

Everett, Evelina Fedorenko, and Edward Gibson. Cognition 3 : Hespos, Susan J. Conceptual precursors to language. Nature Schaller, Susan. A Man Without Words. Berkeley: University of California Press. Whorf, Benjamin. John B. Carroll, ed. MIT Press.

Trained as a cultural anthropologist at the University of Chicago, I have gone on to do fieldwork in Brazil and the United States, and look forward to a new project in New Zealand. I have also co-edited several books, including, with Dr. My research interests include psychological anthropology, sport, dance, human rights, neuroscience, phenomenology, economic anthropology, and just about anything else that catches my attention.

View all posts by gregdowney. It reminds me of the Darmok episode on Star Trek. The language barrier prevents anyone on the Enterprise from understanding what the Tamarians are talking about even though they can understand the actual words.

Federation Universal Translators, although they successfully translate the words, present the syntax as almost nonsensical, because the Tamarians speak entirely by metaphor, referencing mythological and historical people and events from their culture.

The problem with communicating in this fashion is that without knowing the meaning of the reference, the metaphor becomes meaningless. One of the best indicators for progress in Autism is language ability. In some individuals I have wondered if the mental retardation causes the language deficits of if a damaged or limited language center creates the presentation of mental retardation.

I have seen mute kids who had excellent symbolic language ability who could make it in a regular classroom but never said a word for years. Conversely I have seen severely autistic kids just sit and rock, completely oblivious to the world around them even though their vision and hearing was ok. They would sit and howl for hours so they made noise, but had virtually no concept of language and symbolic communication.

So I agree: It is the symbols that make us human not our speech. I remember that episode! The drama is deeply reliant on the intricacies of theory of language. I highly recommend it to anyone with an interest in linguistics. It was recommended to me by a linguist; Russell herself is an anthropologist.

I i came to this after a conversation i came across and not really being able to convey why complexity seemingly requires language and that hits the nail. It is languege through which thought complexity comes about, but languege is the symbolism for any concept. So deaf people process in visual simbols of words or letters, i wonder what that is like? My 23 year old son is somewhere in between your two descriptions of autistic people. He has some language. He also does quite a lot of stimming and may do some nonsensical movement for hours if I let him.

He matters. I am sure they enjoy something. My son, though limited, likes to take long walks, absolutely loves listening to music. His interests are very limited. If you give birth to someone without language, you still see them as human. I guess I am lucky because my son smiles at us and with his eyes he connects. He always has. The people you saw sitting and howling may have been very different at home with their parents.

What is still more remarkable is that every normal child learns the whole system from hearing others use it. Animal communication systems, in contrast, typically have at most a few dozen distinct calls, and they are used only to communicate immediate issues such as food, danger, threat, or reconciliation.

Many of the sorts of meanings conveyed by chimpanzee communication have counterparts in human 'body language'. For animals that use combinations of calls such as some songbirds and some whales , the meanings of the combinations are not made up of the meanings of the parts though there are many species that have not been studied yet.

And the attempts to teach apes some version of human language, while fascinating, have produced only rudimentary results. So the properties of human language are unique in the natural world. How did we get from there to here? All present-day languages, including those of hunter-gatherer cultures, have lots of words, can be used to talk about anything under the sun, and can express negation. As far back as we have written records of human language - years or so - things look basically the same.

Languages change gradually over time, sometimes due to changes in culture and fashion, sometimes in response to contact with other languages. But the basic architecture and expressive power of language stays the same. The question, then, is how the properties of human language got their start.

Obviously, it couldn't have been a bunch of cavemen sitting around and deciding to make up a language, since in order to do so, they would have had to have a language to start with! Intuitively, one might speculate that hominids human ancestors started by grunting or hooting or crying out, and 'gradually' this 'somehow' developed into the sort of language we have today.

Such speculations were so rampant years ago that in the French Academy banned papers on the origins of language! The problem is in the 'gradually' and the 'somehow'.

Chimps grunt and hoot and cry out, too. What happened to humans in the 6 million years or so since the hominid and chimpanzee lines diverged, and when and how did hominid communication begin to have the properties of modern language? Of course, many other properties besides language differentiate humans from chimpanzees: lower extremities suitable for upright walking and running, opposable thumbs, lack of body hair, weaker muscles, smaller teeth - and larger brains. According to current thinking, the changes crucial for language were not just in the size of the brain, but in its character: the kinds of tasks it is suited to do - as it were, the 'software' it comes furnished with.

So the question of the origin of language rests on the differences between human and chimpanzee brains, when these differences came into being, and under what evolutionary pressures. The basic difficulty with studying the evolution of language is that the evidence is so sparse. Spoken languages don't leave fossils, and fossil skulls only tell us the overall shape and size of hominid brains, not what the brains could do. About the only definitive evidence we have is the shape of the vocal tract the mouth, tongue, and throat : Until anatomically modern humans, about , years ago, the shape of hominid vocal tracts didn't permit the modern range of speech sounds.

But that doesn't mean that language necessarily began then. Earlier hominids could have had a sort of language that used a more restricted range of consonants and vowels, and the changes in the vocal tract may only have had the effect of making speech faster and more expressive.

Some researchers even propose that language began as sign language, then gradually or suddenly switched to the vocal modality, leaving modern gesture as a residue. These issues and many others are undergoing lively investigation among linguists, psychologists, and biologists. One important question is the degree to which precursors of human language ability are found in animals.

For instance, how similar are apes' systems of thought to ours? Do they include things that hominids would find it useful to express to each other? There is indeed some consensus that apes' spatial abilities and their ability to negotiate their social world provide foundations on which the human system of concepts could be built.

A related question is what aspects of language are unique to language and what aspects just draw on other human abilities not shared with other primates. This issue is particularly controversial. Some researchers claim that everything in language is built out of other human abilities: the ability for vocal imitation, the ability to memorize vast amounts of information both needed for learning words , the desire to communicate, the understanding of others' intentions and beliefs, and the ability to cooperate.