Review of The Dawn of Language by Sverker Johansson, trs. Frank Perry, pub. Maclehose Press 2022

[sheenaghpugh]

book cover

“Soon after I finished my doctorate in 1990 on the production of lepton pairs in proton collisions in a particle accelerator in Switzerland, I discovered something that was more exciting than physics: language.”

Well, heaven knows I would never argue about that conclusion…. Having recovered from this false start as a particle physicist, Johansson became an MPhil in linguistics and began researching the origins of language, in particular why such a complex spoken language evolved among humans (and indeed changed their own physiology in the process) when it did not in other species. This is a contentious subject which many in the field will not go near, because it necessarily involves much speculation. Those who do indulge in it have argued hugely and sometimes acrimoniously with each other’s theories.

Johansson outlines and discusses all these theories, from those supposing grammar to be an innate brain function that evolved all on its own in one go, to those who see it as a social and communicative function that developed in tandem with the co-operative instinct of humans and over a considerable time. He discusses them with suitable academic detachment (though I have to say, after reading this, or indeed many books on linguistics, you’d be hard put to it not to conclude that Chomsky’s views on the innate grammar module are round the bend). I don’t actually want to go into his arguments and conclusions in detail, which would be a bit like giving away the plot of a detective story. Suffice it to say that I found his method of summarising the conclusions of each chapter in italics at the end very helpful; also his knack of finding illuminating analogies when talking about such things as brain function, which don’t form any part of most readers’ knowledge. One great example of this is when he describes a major difference between the brains of other primates, as compared with humans and birds:

“Primates are completely incapable of imitating sounds. This is largely because they have only indirect control of their vocal tract. In mammals these organs are normally controlled by a particular little brain module deep down in the older parts of the brain. That module is pre-programmed with the normal sounds of the animal and affords no scope for making new sounds. […] In people – and in songbirds and other animals that need to use sounds creatively as well – new ways of making sounds have developed […] there are a number of nerve cables that circumvent the sound module and link the conscious brain and the vocal organs directly. You could liken this to an old computer equipped with a very basic sound card that can only produce a number of standard sounds. It might seem as if the obvious thing to do would be to upgrade to a better sound card with greater range. What evolution has managed instead, in both humans and songbirds, is to let the old sound card remain in place while running cables past it directly from the CPU to the speaker outlet.”

He also, necessarily, uses many examples and analogies from other species, and from human children. This is unavoidable, because the way children learn anything has implications for how humans originally learned it, and I can see why he uses his own children as research material; they are after all his closest source. But I’d rather he anonymised it a bit; “my daughter” somehow sounds more professional and less anecdotal than using her name, and I certainly didn’t need to know that he had named his unfortunate son Faramir.

I think he also, in his preoccupation with why our language abilities are so far developed beyond those of our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, rather skates around the problem of marine mammals, who are also clearly a long way in advance of chimps. And while I am sure he is right about the basic unsociability of chimps, they do sometimes hunt in packs, which surely requires both forethought and communication to some degree.

But this is a very readable foray into a subject that could have been made far less so. I like the way it raises questions we seldom ask about things we thought we knew – eg, if the purpose of language is to communicate information, then the listener, who learns something new, benefits more than the speaker, so why do we all prefer talking to listening? It was also fascinating to see how human physiology has altered to accommodate speech, sometimes with attendant drawbacks in other areas. I can’t imagine a more absorbing field of research than how we became the kind of animal we are, and speech was absolutely central to that evolution.