Language: The Cultural Tool

Where Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes was a memoir with theoretical implications, this is the theoretical framework itself. Everett argues that language is a cultural invention -- a tool shaped by the communities that use it -- not a biological instinct encoded in a universal grammar. Languages vary because cultures vary, and the structures of a language reflect the communicative needs, values, and history of its speakers. The argument draws on fieldwork across multiple languages, not just Pirahã, and engages directly with Chomsky, Pinker, and the nativist tradition. Read alongside Heyes's Cognitive Gadgets, it builds a picture of human cognition as far more culturally constructed than mainstream cognitive science has assumed.