Language as Instinct: A Socio-Cultural Perspective (a review essay) The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language by Steven Pinker. New York: William Morrow, 1994. Pp. 494.

Abstract

Language as Instinct: A Socio-Cultural Perspective (a review essay) The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language by Steven Pinker. New York: William Morrow, 1994. Pp. 494. Reviewed by David E. C. Nordlund University of California, Los Angeles Note to the reader: Issues in Applied Linguistics invites your commentary on The Language Instinct. In our next issues we will publish selected responses to this review. Please submit your essays to Beth Gregory, Book Review Editor, Issues in Applied Linguistics, 3300 Rolfe Hall, U C L A , Los Angeles, C A 90095-1531. INTRODUCTION Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct (1994) will, for some time to come, continue to provoke lively discussion among readers of varied backgrounds. Most issues concerned with language, regardless of intellectual discipline, will spark debate and even division: bilingualism and education, the nationalization of the English language in the United States, race relations, religious discourse, etc. The dialectic value of language as either a mechanism of unification or one of separat­ ism is geographically ubiquitous. While a significant number of Americans lobby for the nationalization of English, the citizens of Quebec narrowly voted in favor of remaining a part of English-speaking Canada, though they will never cease to speak French as their mother tongue. Pinker, a native of Quebec, writes that dif­ ferences in language lead to differences in ethnic identification (p. 241). As Cali- fornians hotly debate the merits of bilingual education, Galicians, Basques, Catalonians, and Valencians in Spain have a constitutional right to educate their children in their regional language. On a larger scale, the Catholic church's Vatican II-mandated use of vernacular language has produced one of the biggest linguistic changes in the history of man (I mean mankind...no, humankind...no, (wo)mankind...or, peoplekind?). As we have just noted, even a single word can throw us a linguistic curve. Roland Barthes (1970) once commented that we all perhaps reveal more by the words that we avoid than by the words that we use (p. 146). A small child talking to an adult, an employee to an employer, an athlete to a referee all know that saying the f-word will result in some type of punishment. As the O. J. Simpson murder trial made obvious, saying the n-word in many contexts is extremely offensive and suggests racial bigotry. Issues in Applied Linguistics © Regents of the University of California ISSN 1050-4273 Vol. 7 No. 2 1996 315-320