Language Genetic or Cultural

The extent to which language in something we're inherently wired for by our genes or developed by culture has long been debated, though the consensus has appeared to lean towards language being "hard-wired" in a lot of fundamental ways. But maybe that's wrong?

There is growing evidence that a lot of elements of language are highly variable, which should mean that they are cultural rather than genetic.

For the past 50 years or so, the dominant theory followed Plato, asserting that language is an innate capacity of the human brain - and culture is at best peripheral to understanding the faculty of language.

Throughout the 20th century, theorists such as Roman Jakobson and Noam Chomsky developed the hypothesis in extremely interesting ways. In Chomsky's version, individual languages are elaborations on a computational system (grammar) provided by the human genome. Culture is irrelevant for the core aspects of this system

I must admit I am puzzled by the continued popularity of nativism. For decades, research supported the idea that language is formed by a number of independent factors, leaving little, if any, work for a "universal grammar" or "language instinct" to do. Some researchers go so far as to argue that universal grammar is nothing more than tautology: humans have language because humans have language. ...

In the end, the question that must worry those who argue there is a language instinct, a universal grammar and the like, is this: if language is shaped by communication, cultural values, information theory and the nature of the brain as a whole, what is there left for a universal grammar to do?

There are far too few studies of the effects of culture on grammar, though there are many on the effects of language on thought, cognition and culture. In future, I hope linguistic anthropologists, cognitive scientists and philosophers will consider more carefully Aristotle's social instinct and the problem it raises - the need to communicate. Language is a set of solutions to the problem forced on us by the social instinct, each solution shaped by a local culture.

Not so much a language instinct, then, as a social and communications instinct. This may sound like a small difference of emphasis in the story of language, but it is in fact nothing short of a completely different story.

Source: New Scientist, 10 March 2012

I've generally accepted the idea that we're born with some sort of "module" or "structure" for language -- something that then adapts to our specific cultural and linguistic situation as we learn whatever language or languages exist around us. Certainly there must be something that makes learning language occur quickly and efficiently because we acquire languages differently from how we acquire other knowledge or behaviors.

Evidence like the above, however, suggests very strongly that much more about language is environmental and cultural than biological. There doesn't appear to be any sort of "universal grammar" underlying the actual grammars of human languages.