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Monday, October 31, 2011

At the root of language learning

It's very interesting to hear scholars speak about how language (in all of its aspects) is learned because most of them assume an evolutionary origin for it.  If one follows the logic of evolution, then the reason for its development in the beginning  was to give an edge to the human species for survival purposes.  This it has done because humans now dominate all of the other species.  Through language, humans could hunt, know where to go to get the best kill, make the best tools, and migrate at just the right times.  That stage was followed by knowing what plants would grow, when they would grow, how long and in what regions.  Then came civilization along the river valleys.  At that point, language took a bent it had not had before.  People learned to control others through language.  Other facets for having language surfaced, such as to provide posterity with a record and to serve as a medium for perpetuation of progress.  There are a few other facets as well.

 So, when I hear about learning language (in any or all of its aspects) and the origin for language is excluded, then I have to wonder about the accuracy of such a learning.  At the root, language is learned to survive.  After that need is insured, then other reasons come into play; however, one has to still ask the question of what need is being fulfilled for learning language.  One learns the language of utility in order to survive. Then, there has to be an external and internal motivation involved in learning or nothing would get perpetuated.  The external motivation can be either negatively or positively reinforced.  Beyond that a person might just have an interest in something or a respect for someone or something which creates a need to learn. 

These five governing principles interact with the plethora of inherent personality traits and that dictates how much of a language a person will learn and which dialects/registers one will learn, and everything else about learning a language.  Techniques for learning a language play into language learning very little, maybe not at all.


Even if a person were to negate evolution as the origin for language, there would still be the need to answer the question of why people learned language to begin with and why they still need to learn language.  Answering why keeps one from straying onto the path of trying to straightjacket young people into learning sets of words that are meaningless outside of the context of language learning principles and personality.


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