That makes us all the same!

Last week, my five year old daughter asked why our pet rabbit Hopsy does not roll over when she is asked to do so. In all the stories she has heard there are animals who could talk.

But in the real world the situation is quite different. If this question was asked by one of my students, I would have given an answer to impress him/her but I went speechless before a five year old. But learning, if more appropriately say, acquiring the first language might be easy for the learner, but tiring for a linguist to explain.

Unique ability

The same kind of questions bothered generations of linguists, scientists and ordinary people around the globe. Why do animals cannot speak like humans? How did humans get this unique ability?

Language acquisition is one of the central topics in biology, psychology as well as linguistics. Every theory of cognition has tried to explain it; probably no other topic has aroused such controversy. Possessing a language is the quintessentially human trait: all normal humans speak, no nonhuman animal does.

Language is the main vehicle by which we know about other people's thoughts, and the two must be intimately related. Every time we speak we are revealing something about language, so the facts of language structure are easy to come by; these data hint at a system of extraordinary complexity. Nonetheless, learning a first language is something every child does successfully in a matter of a few years and without the need for formal lessons.

Fixed repertoire

With language so close to the core of what it means to be human, it is not surprising that children's acquisition of language has received so much attention. Anyone with strong views about the human mind would like to show that children's first few steps are steps in the right direction.

A related question is whether language is unique to humans. At first glance the answer seems obvious. Other animals communicate with a fixed repertoire of signals, or with analogue variation like the mercury in a thermometer. But none appears to have the combinatorial rule system of human language, in which symbols are permuted into an unlimited set of combinations, each with a determinate meaning.

On the other hand, many other claims about human uniqueness, such as that, humans were the only animals to use tools or to fabricate them, have turned out to be false. Some researchers have thought that apes have the capacity for language but never profited from a humanlike cultural milieu in which language was taught, and they have thus tried to teach apes language-like systems.

All humans talk but no house pets or house plants do, no matter how pampered, so heredity must be involved in language. But a child growing up in Japan speaks Japanese, whereas the same child brought up in California would speak English, so the environment is also crucial.

Thus, there is no question about whether heredity or environment is involved in language or even whether one or the other is more important. We know that adult language is intricately complex, and we know that children become adults; therefore, something in the child's mind must be capable of attaining that complexity. On the other hand we never get the competency of our second language like we get it for the first time. If we do, apparently any of the language related issues in the world would never occur.

There are many theories presented by a vast number of scholars including Noam Chomsky on language acquisition. I follow Chomsky as he brought in the universalism. Apart from a tiny set of cultural features, all languages carry a universally similar structure.

If we think in the way of language acquisition, we would not need any other clues to understand that we are none but one race of mankind.