When Daniel L. Everett and his wife Keren Everett started spending 6 to 8 months each year with the Pirahã people of Brazil’s Amazon rain forest in 1977, they hoped to decipher a language that had ...

From NPR News, this is WEEKEND EDITION. I'm Liane Hansen. Dan Everett is a former missionary turned linguist. He's currently a professor at Illinois State University, but he spent the last 30 years ...

The Pirahã are an “ordinary sort of folk,” says Philip Oltermann, a contributor to the British magazine. “They enjoy chatting and socializing,” as well as “a drink or two -- not unlike your average ...

Tom Wolfe wrote a book ostensibly about science that reads as one on snobbery. The Kingdom of Speech offers not one but two haughty villains in Charles Darwin and Noam Chomsky. Alfred Russel Wallace ...

There's no language gene. There's no innate language organ or module in the human brain dedicated to the production of grammatical language. There are no meaningful human universals when it comes to ...

In a Chronicle article last week Tom Bartlett spoke of “a deeply factionalized group of scholars who can’t agree on what they’re arguing about and who tend to dismiss their opponents as morons or ...